HEY RUB-A-DUB-DUB
A BOOK OF THE MYSTERY AND
WONDER AND TERROR
OF LIFE
BOOKS BY
THEODORE DREISER
SISTER CARRIE
JENNIE GERHARDT
THE FINANCIER
THE TITAN
THE GENIUS
A TRAVELER AT FORTY
A HOOSIER HOLIDAY
PLAYS OF THE NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL
THE HAND OF THE POTTER
FREE AND OTHER STORIES
TWELVE MEN
HEY RUB-A-DUB-DUB
A BOOK OF THE MYSTERY AND
WONDER AND TERROR
OF LIFE
By THEODORE DREISER
AUTHOR OF “SISTER CARRIE,” “THE HAND OF THE POTTER,”
“FREE AND OTHER STORIES,” “JENNIE
GERHARDT,” ETC.
[Illustration]
BONI AND LIVERIGHT
NEW YORK 1920
Copyright, 1920,
By BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc.
_Printed in the United States of America_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. HEY RUB-A-DUB-DUB 1
II. CHANGE 19
III. SOME ASPECTS OF OUR NATIONAL CHARACTER 24
IV. THE DREAM 60
V. THE AMERICAN FINANCIER 74
VI. THE TOIL OF THE LABORER 92
VII. PERSONALITY 107
VIII. A COUNSEL TO PERFECTION 115
IX. NEUROTIC AMERICA AND THE SEX IMPULSE 126
X. SECRECY--ITS VALUE 142
XI. IDEALS, MORALS, AND THE DAILY NEWSPAPER 152
XII. EQUATION INEVITABLE 157
XIII. PHANTASMAGORIA 182
XIV. ASHTORETH 201
XV. THE REFORMER 206
XVI. MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE 212
XVII. MORE DEMOCRACY OR LESS? AN INQUIRY 225
XVIII. THE ESSENTIAL TRAGEDY OF LIFE 238
XIX. LIFE, ART AND AMERICA 252
XX. THE COURT OF PROGRESS 277
HEY RUB-A-DUB-DUB
HEY, RUB-A-DUB-DUB!
(_Taken from the notes of the late John Paradiso_)
I have lived now to my fortieth year, and have seen a good deal of life.
Just now, because of a stretch of poverty, I am living across the river
from New York, in New Jersey, in sight of a splendid tower, the
Woolworth Building on the lower end of Manhattan, which lifts its
defiant spear of clay into the very maw of heaven. And although I am by
no means as far from it as is Fifth Avenue, still I am a dweller in one
of the shabbiest, most forlorn neighborhoods which the great metropolis
affords. About me dwell principally Poles and Hungarians, who palaver in
a lingo of which I know nothing and who live as I would despise to live,
poor as I am. For, after all, in my hall-bedroom, which commands the
river over the lumberyard, there is some attempt at intellectual
adornment, whereas outside and around me there is little more than dull
and to a certain extent aggrieved drudgery.
Not so very far from me is a church, a great yellow structure which
lifts its walls out of a ruck of cheap frame houses, and those muddy,
unpaved streets which are the pride of Jersey City and Hoboken. Here, if
I will, I can hear splendid masses intoned, see bright altars and
stained glass windows and people going to confession and burning votive
candles before images. And if I go of a Sunday, which I rarely do, I can
hear regularly that there is a Christ who died for men, and that He was
the son of the living God who liveth and reigneth world without end.
I have no quarrel with this doctrine. I can hear it in a hundred
thousand churches throughout the world. But I am one of those curious
persons who cannot make up their minds about anything. I read and read,
almost everything that I can lay hands on--history, politics,
philosophy, art. But I find that one history contradicts another, one
philosopher drives out another. Essayists, in the main, point out flaws
and paradoxes in the current conception of things; novelists, dramatists
and biographers spread tales of endless disasters, or silly illusions
concerning life, duty, love, opportunity and the like. And I sit here
and read and read, when I have time, wondering.
For, friends, I am a scrivener by trade--or try to be. Betimes, trying
to make up my mind what to say about life, I am a motorman on a
street-car at three dollars and twenty cents a day. I have been a handy
man in a junk shop, and wagon driver, anything you will, so long as
thereby I could keep body and soul together. I am not handsome, and
therefore not attractive to women probably--at any rate I appear not to
be--and in consequence am very much alone. Indeed, I am a great coward
when it comes to women. Their least frown or mood of indifference
frightens me and makes me turn inward to myself, where dwell innumerable
beautiful women who smile and nod and hang on my arm and tell me they
love me. Indeed, they whisper of scenes so beautiful and so comforting
that I know they are not, and never could be, true. And so, in my best
moments, I sit at my table and try to write stories which no doubt
equally necessitous editors find wholly unavailable.
The things which keep me thinking and thinking are, first, my social and
financial state; second, the difference between my point of view and
that of thousands of other respectable citizens, who, being able to make
up their minds, seem to find me queer, dull, recessive, or at any rate
unsuited to their tastes and pleasures. I look at them, and while I say,
“Well, thank heaven I am not like that,” still I immediately ask myself,
“Am I not all wrong? Should I not be happier if I, too, were like John
Spitovesky, or Jacob Feilchenfeld, or Vaclav Melka?”--some of my present
neighbors. For Spitovesky, to grow a little personal, is a small dusty
man who has a tobacco store around the corner, and who would, I
earnestly believe, run if he were threatened with a bath. He smokes his
own three-for-fives (Flor de Sissel Grass), and deposits much of the
ashes between his waistcoat and his gray striped cotton shirt. His hair,
sticking bushily out over his ears, looks as though it were heavily
peppered with golden snuff.
“Mr. Spitovesky,” I said to him one day not long since, “have you been
reading anything about the Colorado mining troubles?”
“I never read de papers,” he said with a shrug of his shoulder.
“No? Not at all?” I pursued.
“Dere is nodding in dem--lies mosdly. Somedimes I look ad de baseball
news in sommer.”
“Oh, I see,” I said hopelessly. Then, apropos of nothing, or because I
was curious as to my neighbors, “Are you a Catholic?”
“I doaned belong to no church. I doaned mix in no politics, neider. Some
hof de men aboud here get excided aboud politics; I got no time. I ’tend
to mine store.”
Seeing him stand for hours against his doorpost, or sitting out front
smoking while his darksome little wife peels potatoes or sews or fusses
with the children, I could never understand his “I got no time.”
In a related sense there are my friends Jacob Feilchenfeld and Vaclav
Melka, whom I sometimes envy because they are so different. The former,
the butcher to whom I run for chops and pigs’ feet for my landlady,
Mrs. Wscrinkuus; the latter the keeper of a spirituous emporium whose
windows read “Vynas, Scnapas.” Jacob, like every other honest butcher
worthy the name, is broad and beefy. He turns on me a friendly eye as he
inquires, “About so thick?” or suggests that he has some nice fresh
liver or beef tongue, things which he knows Mrs. Wscrinkuus likes. I can
sum up Mr. Feilchenfeld’s philosophy of life when I report that to every
intellectual advance I make he exclaims in a friendly enough way, “I
dunno,” or “I ain’t never heard about dot.”
My pride in a sturdy, passive acceptance of things, however, is nearly
realized in Vaclav Melka, the happy dispenser of “Vynas, Scnapsas.” He
also is frequently to be found leaning in his doorway in summer,
business being not too brisk during the daytime, surveying the world
with a reflective eye. He is dark, stocky, black-haired, black-eyed, a
good Pole with a head like a wooden peg, almost flat at the top, and
driven firmly albeit not ungracefully into his shoulders. He has a wife
who is a slattern and nearly a slave, and three children who seem to
take no noticeable harm from this saloon life. Leaning in coatless ease
against his sticky bar of an evening, he has laid down the law
concerning morals and ethics, thus: no lying or stealing--among friends;
no brawling or assaults or murdering for any save tremendous reasons of
passion; no truckling to priests or sisters who should mind their own
business.
“Did you ever read a book, Melka?” I once asked him. It was apropos of a
discussion as to a local brawl.
“Once. It was about a feller wot killed a woman. Mostly I ain’t got no
time to read. Once I was a bath-rubber, and I had time then, but that
was long ago. Books ain’t nutting for me.”
Melka states, however, that he was a fool to come here. “A feller wanted
me to take dis saloon, and here I am. I make a living. If my wife died
I would go back to my old job, I think.” He does not want his wife to
die, I am sure. It does not make that much difference.
But over the river from all this is another picture which disturbs me
even more than my present surroundings, because, as seen from here, it
is seemingly beautiful and inviting. Its tall walls are those of a
fabled city. I can almost hear the tinkle of endless wealth in banks,
the honks of automobiles, the fanfare of a great constructive trade
life. At night all its myriad lights seem to wink at me and exclaim,
“Why so incompetent? Why so idle, so poor? Why live in such a wretched
neighborhood? Why not cross over and join the great gay throng, make a
successful way for yourself? Why sit aside from this great game of
materiality and pretend to ignore it or to feel superior?”
And as I sit and think, so it seems to me. But, alas, I haven’t the
least faculty for making money, not the least. Plainly beyond are all
these wonderful things which are being done and made by men with that
kind of ability which I appear to lack. I have no material, constructive
sense. I can only think and write, in a way. I see these vast
institutions (there are great warehouses on this side, too) filled to
overflowing apparently with the financially interested and capable, but
I--I have not the least idea how to do anything likewise. Yet I am not
lazy. I toil over my stories or bounce out of bed and hurry to my work
of a morning. But I have never earned more than thirty-five dollars a
week in my whole life. No, I am not brilliant financially.
But the thing that troubles me most is the constant palaver going on in
the papers and everywhere concerning right, truth, duty, justice, mercy
and the like, things which I do not find expressed very clearly in my
own motives nor in the motives of those immediately about me; and also
the apparently earnest belief on the part of ever so many editors,
authors, social reformers, et cetera, that every person, however weak
or dull-appearing externally, contains within himself the seed or the
mechanism for producing endless energy and ability, providing he can
only be made to realize that he has it. In other words we are all
Napoleons, only we don’t know it. We are lazy Napoleons, idle Hannibals,
wasteful and indifferent John D. Rockefellers. Turn the pages of any
magazine--are there not advertisements of and treatises on How To Be
Successful, with the authors thereof offering to impart their knowledge
of how so to be for a comparative song?
Well, I am not one who can believe that. In my very humble estimation
people are not so. They are, in the main, as I see it, weak and limited,
exceedingly so, like Vaclav Melka or Mrs. Wscrinkuus, and to fill their
humble brains with notions of an impossible supremacy, if it could be
done, would be to send them forth to breast the ocean in a cockleshell.
And, yet, here on my table, borrowed from the local library for purposes
of idle or critical examination, is a silly book entitled “Take
It!”--“It” meaning “_the world!_”; and another “It’s Yours!”--the “It”
in this case meaning that same great world! All you have to do is to
decide so to do--and to try! Am I a fool to smile at this very stout
doctrine, to doubt whether you can get more than four quarts out of any
four-quart measure, if so much?
But to return to this same matter of right, truth, justice, mercy, so
freely advertised in these days and so clearly defined, apparently, in
every one’s mind as open paths by which they may proceed. In the main,
it seems to me that people are not concerned about right, or truth, or
justice, or mercy, or duty, as abstract principles or working rules, nor
do I believe that the average man knows clearly or even semi-clearly
what is meant by the words. His only relation to them, so far as I can
see, is that he finds them used in a certain reckless, thoughtless way
to represent some method of adjustment by which he would like to think
he is protected from assault or saved from misery, and so uses them
himself. His concern for them as related to the other individual is that
the other individual should not infringe on him, and I am now speaking
of the common unsuccessful mass as well as of the successful.
Mrs. Wscrinkuus, poor woman, is stingy and slightly suspicious, although
she goes to church Sundays and believes that Christ’s Sermon on the
Mount is the living truth. She does not want any one to be mean to her;
she does not do anything mean to other people, largely because she has
no particular taste or capacity in that direction. Supposing I should
advise her to “Take It!” assure her that “It” was hers by right of
capability! What would become of _right_, _truth_, _justice_, _mercy_ in
that case?
Or, once more, let us take Jacob Feilchenfeld and John Spitovesky, who
care for no man beyond their trade and whose attitude toward right,
truth, mercy, justice is as above. Suppose I should tell them to take
“It,” or assure them that “It” was theirs? Of what import would the
message be? Vaclav Melka does favors only in return for favors. He does
not like priests because they are always taking up collections. If you
told him to take “It” he would proceed to take something away from the
very good priests first of all. Everywhere I find the common man imbued
with this feeling for self-protection and self-advancement. _Truth_ is
something that must be told to _him_; _justice_ is what _he_
deserves--although if it costs him nothing he will gladly see it
extended to the other fellow.
But do not think for one moment because I say this that I think myself
better or more deserving or wiser than any of these. As I said before, I
do not understand life, although I like it; I may even say that I like
this sharp, grasping scheme of things, and find that it works well.
Plainly it produces all the fine spectacles I see. If it had not been
for a certain hard, seeking ambition in Mr. Woolworth to get up and be
superior to his fellows, where would his splendid tower have come from?
It is only because I cannot understand why people cling so fatuitously
to the idea that there is some fixed idyllic scheme or moral order
handed down from on high, which is tender and charitable, punishes
so-called evil and always rewards so-called good, that I write this. If
it punishes evil, it is not all of the evil that I see. If it rewards
good, then much of the good that I admire goes wholly unrewarded, on
this earth at least.
But to return. The Catholics believe that Christ died on the Cross for
them, and that unless the Buddhists, Shintoists, Mohammedans, et cetera,
reform or find Christ they will be lost. Three hundred million
Mohammedans believe quite otherwise. Two hundred and fifty million
Buddhists believe something else. The Christian Scientists and Hicksites
believe still differently. Then there are historians who doubt the
authenticity of Christ (Gibbon; Vol. I, Chapters 15, 16). Where is a
moral order which puts a false interpretation on history as in the case
of sectarian literature (lists furnished on application), or allows
fetiches to flourish like the grass of the new year?
I will admit that in cases such as lying, stealing and the like there is
always a so-called moral thing to do or say when these so-called moral
principles or beatitudes are inveighed against. You have ridden on a
street-car; pay your fare. You have received five dollars from a given
man; return it. You have had endless favors from a given individual; do
not malign him. Such are the obvious and commonplace things with which
these great words are concerned; and in these prima facie cases these
so-called principles work well enough.
But take a case where temperament or body-needs or appetites fly in the
face of man-made order, where a great spirit-thirst stands out against a
life-made conviction. Here is a man-made law, and here is dire
necessity. On which side is Right? On which side God?
(1) A girl falls in love with a boy to whom the father takes an instant
dislike. The father is not better than the lover, just different. The
girl and boy are aflame (no chemical law of their invention, mind you),
and when the father opposes them they wed secretly. Result, rage. A weak
temperament on the part of the father (no invention of his own) causes
him to drink. On sight, in liquor, he kills the youth. The law says he
must be hung unless justified. A lie on the part of the girl defaming
the lover-husband will save the father. On which side now do right,
truth, justice, mercy stand?
(2) A man has a great trade idea. He sees where by combining fourteen
companies he can reduce cost of manufacture and sell a very necessary
product to the public at a reduced rate, the while he makes himself
rich. In the matter of principle and procedure (right, truth, justice,
etc.), since his competitors will not sell out, he is confronted by the
following propositions: (a) forming a joint stock company and permitting
them all to share in the profits; (b) giving them the idea, asking
nothing, and allowing them to form a company of their own, so helping
humanity; (c) making a secret combination with four or five and
underselling the others and so compel them to sell or quit; (d) doing
nothing, letting time and chance work and the public wait. Now it so
happens that the second and fourth are the only things that can be done
without opposition. He is a man of brains and ideals. What are his
rights, duties, privileges? Where do justice, mercy, truth, fit in here,
and how?
(3) A man’s son has committed a crime. The man realizes that owing to
deficiencies of his own he has never been able to give the boy a right
training or a fair chance. The law demands that he give up his son, even
though he loves him dearly and feels himself responsible. Where do
right, justice, mercy work here, and can they be made harmonious and
consonant?
These are but three of fifty instances out of the current papers which I
daily read. I have cited them to show how topsy-turvy the world seems to
me, how impossible of a fixed explanation or rule. Scarcely any two
individuals but will be at variance on these propositions. Yet the
religionists, the moralists, the editorial writers preach a faith and an
obvious line of duty which they label grandiosely “right” or “true,”
“just” or “merciful.” My observation and experience lead me to believe
that there is scarcely a so-called “sane,” right, merciful, true, just,
solution to anything. I know that many will cry in answer “Look at all
this great world! Look at all the interesting things made, the beautiful
things, the pleasures provided. Are not these the intelligent directive
product of a superior governing being, who is kind and merciful into the
bargain and who has our interests at heart? Can you doubt, when you
observe the exact laws that govern in mathematics, chemistry, physics,
that there is an intelligent, kindly ruling power, truthful, merciful,
etc?” My answer is: I can and do, for these things can be used as
readily against right, truth, justice, mercy, as we understand those
things, as they can for or with them. If you don’t believe this, and are
anti-German or anti-Japanese, or anti-anything else, see how those or
any other so-called inimical powers can use all these magnificent forces
or arts in its behalf and against the powers of light and worth such as
you understand and approve of. And when justice and mercy are tacked on
as attributes of this intelligence there is no possible appeal to
_human_ reason.
“But only look,” some one is sure to cry, “at some of the beautiful,
wonderful, helpful things which Divine Providence, or Life, or Force, or
Energy has provided now and here for man! Railroads; telegraphy; the
telephone; theaters; gas; electricity; clothing of all sorts;
newspapers; books; hotels; stores; fire departments; hospitals;
plumbing; the pleasures of love and sex; music.” An admirable list,
truly, and all provided by one struggling genius or another or by the
slow, cataclysmic processes of nature: fires, deaths and painful births.
Aside from the fact that all of these things can be and are used for
_evil_ as well as _good_ purposes (trust oppression, enemy wars and the
like), still it might as well be supplemented by such things as jails,
detectives, penitentiaries, courts of law--good or evil things, as you
choose to look at them. All of these things are good in the hands of
good people, evil in the hands of the evil, and nature seems not to care
which group uses them. A hospital will aid a scoundrel as readily as a
good man, and vice versa.
Common dust swept into our atmosphere makes our beautiful sunsets and
blue sky. Sidereal space, as we know it, is said to be one welter of
strangely flowing streams of rock and dust, a wretched mass made
attractive only by some vast compulsory coalition into a star. Stars
clash and blaze, and the whole great complicated system seems one
erosive, chaffering, bickering effort, with here and there a tendency to
stillness and petrifaction. This world as we know it, the human race and
the accompanying welter of animals and insects, do they not, aside from
momentary phases of delight and beauty, often strike you as dull,
aimless, cruel, useless? Are not the processes by which they are
produced or those by which they live (the Chicago slaughter-houses, for
instance), stark, relentless, brutal, shameful even?--life living on
life, the preying of one on another, the compulsory aging of all, the
hungers, thirsts, destroying losses and pains....
But I was talking of Jersey City and my difficulty in adjusting myself
to the life about me, thinking as I do. Yet such facts as I can gather
only confound me the more. Take the daily papers which I have been
reading to beguile my loneliness, and note that:
(1) Two old people who lived near me, after working hard for years to
supply themselves with a competence, were ruined by the failure of a
bank and were therefore forced to seek work. Not finding it, they were
compelled to make a choice between subsisting on charity and dying.
Desiring to be as agreeable to the world as possible and not to be a
burden to it, they chose death by gas, locking the doors of their bare
little home, stuffing paper and clothing into chinks and under doors and
windows, and turning on the gas, seated side-by-side and hand-in-hand.
Naturally the end came quickly enough, for Divine Mind has no objection
to ordinary illuminating gas killing any one. It did not inform any one
of their predicament. Impartial gas choked them as quickly as it would
have lighted the room, and yet at the same time, according to the same
papers, in this very same world----
(2) The sixteen-year-old son of a multi-millionaire real estate holder
was left over fifty million dollars by his fond father, who did not know
what else to do with it, the same son having not as yet exhibited any
capacity for handling the money wisely or having done anything to
deserve it save be the son of the aforesaid father.
(3) A somewhat bored group of Newport millionairesses give a dinner for
the pet dogs of their equally wealthy friends, one particular dog or
doggess being host or hostess.
(4) A Staten Island brewer worth twenty millions died of heart failure,
induced by undue joy over the fact that he had been elected snare
drummer of a shriners’ lodge, after spending thousands upon thousands in
organizing a band of his own and developing sufficient influence to
cause a shriners’ organization to tolerate him.
(5) A millionaire politician and horse-racer erected a
fifteen-thousand-dollar monument to a horse.
(6) An uneducated darkey, trying to make his way North, climbed upon the
carriage trucks of a Pullman attached to a fast express and was swept
North into a blizzard, where he was finally found dying of exhaustion,
and did die--arms and legs frozen--a victim of an effort to better his
condition.
Puzzle: locate Divine Mind, Light, Wisdom, Truth, Justice, Mercy in
these items.
By these same papers, covering several months or more, I saw where:
(1) Several people died waiting in line on bundle day for bundles of
cast-off clothing given by those who could not use the clothes any
longer--not such people as you and I, perhaps, but those who were sick,
or old, or weak.
(2) Mr. Ford, manufacturer of automobiles, was convinced that he could
reform any criminal or bad character by giving him or her plenty of work
to do at good wages and with the prospect of advancement; also that he
was earning too much and wished to divide with his fellow man.
(3) August Belmont and J. P. Morgan, Jr., noting this item, concluded
that they could not do anything for any one, intellectually, financially
or otherwise.
(4) An attendant in an Odd Fellows Home, having tired of some old
patients, chloroformed them all--a purely pagan, event and not possible
in an enlightened age and a Christian country.
(5) A priest, having murdered a girl and confessed to it, no way was
found to electrocute him because of his cloth. Men whose services and
aid he contemned insisted that he must be proved insane and not be
electrocuted, though he did not agree with them.
(6) A young soldier and his bride, but one day married, walk out to buy
furniture for their new home; a street fight in which three toughs
assail each other with pistols breaks out and before they can take to
cover a stray bullet instantly kills the soldier-husband. Subsequently
the bride becomes morbid and goes insane.
(7) In nearly all the countries of the late great war a day of prayer
for Divine intervention was indulged in, but prayer having been made and
not answered the combatants proceeded to make more and worse war--Divine
prohibition of combat, according to the Christian dogma, being no bar
nor of any avail.
(8) A well-known Western financier and promoter of strong religious and
moralistic leanings, having projected and built a well-known railroad
and made it immensely prosperous by reducing the rates to the people of
his region was thereupon set upon by other financiers who wished to
secure his property for little or nothing, and being attacked by false
charges brought by a suborned stockholder and his road thrown into the
hands of a receiver by a compliant judge, was so injured financially
thereby as never to be able to recover his property. And those who
attacked him justified themselves on the ground that he was a
“rate-cutter” and so a disturbing element--a disturber of the peace and
profits of other railroads adjacent and elsewhere. His dying statement
(years later) was that American history would yet justify him and that
God governed for good, if one could wait long enough!
(9) One man was given one year for a cold, brutal manslaughter in New
York, whereas a whole family of colored people in the South was strung
up and riddled with bullets for so little as that one of them fought
with a deputy sheriff; while a woman who had shot another woman through
a window because of jealousy (aroused by her husband’s assumed
attentions to said woman) was acquitted and then went on the stage, the
general sentiment being that “one could not electrocute a woman.”
(10) The principal charities aid society of New York had spent and was
spending one hundred and fifty thousand dollars per year on running
expenses, and something over ninety thousand dollars in actual relief
work, though it was explained that the hundred and fifty thousand
brought about much reference of worthy cases to other agencies and
private charities, a thing which could not otherwise have been done.
(11) It is immoral, un-Christian and illegitimate to have a child
without a husband, yet when six hundred thousand men are withdrawn from
England to fight the Germans and twenty thousand virgins become
war-brides it is proposed to legalize the children on the ground that it
is nevertheless moral to preserve the nation from extinction.
(12) A doctor may advise against child-birth when that experience would
endanger a woman or threaten her permanent disability, but if he gives
information or furnishes contraceptal means which would prevent the
trying situation he is guilty of a misdemeanor, subject to fine and the
ruin of his career.
(13) The president of one of the largest street railway corporations in
the world finds it wrong to fail to rise and give your seat to a woman,
but right to run so few cars as to make available seats for only
one-third of the traffic; wrong not to take extreme precaution in
stepping off or on a car or crossing the tracks, but right to leave the
cars without heat, the windows and floors dirty and the doors broken,
making anger, delay and haste contribute to inattention and unfairness;
wrong to read a newspaper wide open, to cross your legs or protrude your
feet too far, thereby inconveniencing your fellow-passenger, but right
to mulct the city, composed of these same passengers, of millions via
stolen franchises, watered stock, avoided taxes, the refusal of
transfers at principal intersections, to say nothing of the prevention
of fair competition via the jitney bus and other means which would
relieve traffic pressure, and all with no excuse save that the
corporation desires the money; and a tame public endures it with a
little ineffectual murmuring.
(14) A man has been found in a Western penitentiary who had been there
for twenty years and who had been sent there because of erroneous
circumstantial evidence, the real offender having confessed on his
death-bed.
(15) A certain landlord in New York compelled a certain family to move,
because, not they, but some of their visitors, wore shabby, hence
undesirable, clothes, thus lowering the social and material tone of the
apartment house in question and causing their distant but still watchful
fellow-tenants much distress of mind in being compelled to live in such
an atmosphere. This was a Riverside Drive apartment.
But need I cite more, really?
It is because of these things that I sit in my hall-bedroom, a great
panorama of beauty spread out before me, and in attempting to write of
this thing, life, find myself confused. I do not know how to work right,
truth, justice, mercy, etc., into these things, nor am I sure that life
would be as fascinating without them, as driving or forceful. The scenes
that I look upon here and everywhere are beautiful enough, sun, moon and
stars swinging in their courses, seemingly mathematically and with great
art or charm. I am willing to assume that their courses are calculated
and intelligent, but no more and no further. And the river at this
moment is begemmed with thousands of lights--a truly artistic and poetic
spectacle and one not to be gainsaid. By day it is gray, or blue, or
green, wondrous shades by turns; by night a jewel world. Gulls wheel
over it; tugs strain cheerily to and fro, emitting gorgeous plumes of
smoke. Snows, rains, warmths, colds come in endless variety, the endless
fillip which gives force and color to our days.
Still I am confused. For, on the one hand, here is Vaclav Melka, who
does not care much for this alleged charm; nor John Spitovesky; nor
Jacob Feilchenfeld; nor many, many others like them. On the other hand,
myself and many others like me, sitting and meditating on it, are so
spellbound that we have scarcely any thought wherewith to earn a
living. Life seems to prove but one thing to me, and that is that the
various statements concerning right, truth, justice, mercy are palaver
merely, an earnest and necessitous attempt, perhaps, at balance and
equation where all things are so very much unbalanced, paradoxical and
contradictory--the small-change names for a thing or things of which we
have not yet caught the meaning. History teaches me little save that
nothing is really dependable or assured, but all inexplicable and all
shot through with a great desire on the part of many to do or say
something by which they may escape the unutterable confusion of time and
the feebleness of earthly memory. Current action, it appears,
demonstrates much the same thing. Kings and emperors have risen and
gone. Generals and captains have warred and departed. Philosophers have
dreamed, poets have written; and I, mussing around among religions,
philosophies, fictions and facts can find nothing wherewith to solve my
vaulting egoism, no light, and no way to be anything more than the
humblest servitor.
Among so much that is tempestuous and glittering I merely occasionally
scrub and make bright my room. I look out at the river flowing by now,
after hundreds of millions of years of loneliness where there was
nothing but silence and waste (past so much now that is vivid, colorful,
human), and say to myself: Well, where there is so much order and love
of order in every one and everywhere there must be some great elemental
spirit holding for order of sorts, at any rate. Stars do not swing in
given orbits for nothing surely, or at least I might have faith to that
extent. But when I step out and encounter, as I daily do, lust and
greed, plotting and trapping, and envy and all uncharitableness,
including murder--all severely condemned by the social code, the Bible
and a thousand wise saws and laws--and also see, as I daily do, vast
schemes of chicane grinding the faces of the poor, and wars brutally
involving the death of millions whose lives are precious to them
because of the love of power on the part of some one or many, I am not
so sure. Illusions hold too many; lust and greed, vast and bleary-eyed,
dominate too many more. Ignorance, vast and almost unconquerable, hugs
and licks its chains in reverence. Brute strength sits empurpled and
laughs a throaty laugh.
Yet here is the great river--that is beautiful; and Mr. Woolworth’s
tower, a strange attempt on the part of man to seem more than he is; and
a thousand other evidences of hopes and dreams, all too frail perhaps
against the endless drag toward nothingness, but still lovely and
comforting. And yet here also is Vaclav Melka, who wants to be a
bath-rubber again! John Spitovesky, who doesn’t care; Jacob
Feilchenfeld, who never heard; and millions of others like them, and
I--I think and grow confused, and earn nineteen-twenty a week or
less--never more, apparently.
Come to think of it, is it not a wonder, holding such impossible views
as I do, that I earn anything at all?
CHANGE
If I were to preach any doctrine to the world it would be love of
change, or at least lack of fear of it. From the Bible I would quote:
“The older order changeth, giving place to the new,” and from Nietzsche:
“Learn to revalue your values.” The most inartistic and discouraging
phase of the visible scene, in so far as it relates to humanity, is its
tendency to stratification, stagnation and rigidity. Yet from somewhere,
fortunately, out of the demiurge there blows ever and anon a new breath,
quite as though humanity were an instrument through which a force were
calling for freshness and change. The old or unyielding die or crumble;
the unwitting young arise to take their places. By this same thing which
brings man into being is he ended before he becomes inelastic and
unpliable. Indeed, Nature constantly replaces her handiwork, quite as in
the case of the leaves on the trees, creating newer, greener, sappier
things. This is just as true of religions, theories, arts and
philosophies as it is of animals, races and individuals. Nothing is
fixed. The most convincing and stable thing that you know may well bear
inquiring scrutiny, even this law of change. Out of the well-springs of
the deep what may not arise?
I often think how foolishly humanity opposes change at times and how
steadily and uninterruptedly it flows in, altering the face of the
world. With how many astounding changes has not life been
visited--astounding only because life never seems to be prepared for the
astounding. Our little earth minds, being only seventy years in duration
and wise only by reason of the actual experience which can be crowded
into that time, cannot but view as astounding those larger natural
phenomena which in the endless duration of time come swiftly enough,
however incalculably slow they may seem to us. “For a thousand years in
thy sight are as but yesterday,” a million years but a day in geologic
time. But to a being whose duration is only seventy years, whose
thinking period about forty, how remote they seem, even impossible! If
one could live a thousand years the value of change in connection with
many things would appear swiftly enough, and the seemingly astounding
would become the natural and even the commonplace.
If one but observes the phenomena of geology and of biology one may see
how ready Nature is to quit one form of effort for another, once its
uselessness has become apparent, to drop a difficult tendency in one
direction and pursue an easier one in another. Indeed, the theory of the
pragmatist is seemingly well-emphasized at times by the disappearance of
some large and presumably successful species for reasons of difficulty
in connection with its sustenance, and the steady rise of some minor
creature whose wants are simple and not difficult to satisfy. And it is
not necessarily through æons and æons of time that those changes are
accomplished but almost instanter, as when behemoth ended and the great
auk puffed out. Man says to himself today, “I am the Lord of creation,”
but is he? A slight change in the chemistry of our atmosphere, so slight
that it might be scarcely noticeable, a change in the odor of the air or
the taste of the water, could soon end or debilitate him so as to make
him of no import whatsoever. It might be unfavorable to man and
favorable, let us say, to cats or spiders; then man, a sleepy stumbling
creature, would be devoured by his hungry, pagan house pet and the
theory of his domination disposed of. Remote? So was the rise of
Christianity. If you do not believe this read history, or note what
tragedies a slight trace of sewer gas can produce in your own household,
how smoke ends a corps of firemen, how water, too much heat, too much
cold, may destroy us all. And what star so humble that if it came near
enough could not effect one or another of these changes?
Deep below deep lie the mysteries, and theories flourish like weeds in a
garden--or let us call them flowers, for at times they are so artistic.
Arts spring out of the mysteries, but the arts themselves grow stale if
left to themselves. The thing that the individual should remember is
that he is a part of this vast restlessness, uncertainty and
opportunism. Life will have none of anything forever, neither Egypt nor
Greece nor Rome nor England nor America; it will not have anything of
one type of god, nor a fixed code of morals, nor a fixed conclusion as
to what is art, nor a method of living. We build up rules wherewith life
is to be governed, and behold!--some fine day the character of life
itself changes and our rules are worthless.
Many of us now dream that there is such a thing as justice, but
experience teaches us that it is an abstraction and that what we
actually see is an occasional compromise struck in an eternal battle.
Many believe that there is such a thing as truth, but, if there is, it
is not within the consciousness of man, for he has not the knowledge
wherewith to discern it. There is too much that he does not know to
permit him to say what is truth. Likewise, virtue and honesty go by the
boards as names merely, a system of weights and measures, balances
struck between man and man. They are symbols of something which man
would like to believe true and permanent. They represent a balance he
would like to strike between extremes on either hand, but they are only
important to him in his state here. Beyond him lie the deeps which may
know them not. All we can know is that we cannot know.
Therefore, what I would most earnestly advocate, if it were of any
importance so to do, would be love of change, for by change have come
all the spectacles, all the charms and all the creature comforts of
which our consciousness is aware. Life appears to be innately artistic
in all that it attempts, so that we need not trouble ourselves about
that; we can scarcely escape it. If there is a seeming love of order, of
stratification, of fixity, in connection with many things, an equally
unending force appears to be bent on change and variation, so that that
something within us which tends to rigid duty and stratification spells
suffering or disappointment for us in so far as we are unable to
counteract it. The caution, sprung from somewhere, to keep an open mind
is well-grounded in Nature’s tendency to change. Not to cling too
pathetically to a religion or a system of government or a theory of
morals or a method of living, but to be ready to abandon at a moment’s
notice is the apparent teaching of the ages--to be able to step out free
and willing to accept new and radically different conditions. This
apparently is the ideal state for the human mind. Not that anything so
much more perfect is in store (I, for one, do not believe that), but
that a different thing is at hand, always, outside your door, around the
corner, beyond the limits of the vision of even the philosopher and the
thinker. To be always ready, if such a thing were possible, to meet the
new and to know that it will be as valuable as the old--that is the
great thing. But what vain advice! for the experiences, the capacities,
the tendencies of man are not in his keeping. There is something
controlling, of which we are a part and not a part; there is a mystery
to which we belong yet which will not show to us its face. Only its
impulses burst upon us from day to day and from century to century,
making us weep from fear or regret, or faint with terror, or thrill wild
with joy. Out of the deeps they come--the realms we do not know. What is
Master? Who? What is He or It like? Only by the artistry and the terror
and the peace and the change through which it works can we guess, and
all names and fames and blames by which we qualify it are as nothing,
save that they brighten the face of its one outstanding tendency, which
we must accept whether we will or not--change.
SOME ASPECTS OF OUR NATIONAL CHARACTER
Our most outstanding phases, of course, are youth, optimism and
illusion. These run through everything we do, affect our judgments and
passions, our theories of life. As children we should all have had our
fill of these, and yet even at this late date and after the late war,
which should have taught us much, it is difficult for any of us to
overcome them. Still, no one can refuse to admire the youth and optimism
of America, however much they may resent its illusion. There is always
something so naïve about its method of procedure, so human and tolerant
at times; so loutish, stubborn and ignorantly insistent at others, as
when carpetbag government was forced on the South after the Civil War
and Jefferson Davis detained in prison for years after the war was over.
Great men and great events, so I was told in my youth, went to the
making of us. The dreams of justly dissatisfied and downtrodden souls
elsewhere, so our histories read, impelled them to seek in a new land
freedom from the tyrannies which had oppressed them abroad. Once here,
they were prepared to fight and die in order that the vision which had
led them forth might not end as an airy insubstantial nothing. For us
(fatalistically, at any rate, if not really) Columbus sailed from Palos
over the uncharted deep; Magellen rounded the Cape of Good Hope; and
Vasco da Gama, Cape Horn; Balboa discovered the Pacific, Hendrick Hudson
the Hudson; De Soto and Marquette the Mississippi. For us, especially
(although before that, great sociologic, economic and moral dreamers had
been at work), Locke, Paine, Von Humboldt, Voltaire, Fourier, de
Tocqueville, Rousseau thought and dreamed.
In our new land, fresh upon an unbroken soil, giant spirits swiftly
arose to testify to the significance of these dreams--Washington,
Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, intellectual and social
enthusiasts all--who saw a vision, or seemed to, and dreamed tremendous
dreams of the wonders to come to our nation and race, and because of it
and through it to the world at large. We, more than any other nation,
because ours was the youth and the strength, were to lift and maintain
aloft the banner of intellectual and spiritual freedom. We were to do
tremendous things, not for the human pocketbook but the human mind and
soul. Our children and our children’s children were to be free,
progressive, fearless, mentally and spiritually alert, entirely loosened
from the trammels and chains of superstition and the degradation of
poverty and want.
Well, it is quite true that we have done some things: fought wars for
our “rights”; freed the slaves (which, however, England did in her
territories before we did and without bloodshed); “liberated” Cuba (to
no exploitation since?); struggled with the Philippine and Mexican
problems (to no final solution however); and then helped to crush the
Kaiser without seeking gain for ourselves. However, it is also quite
true that at no time in our history has this ideal been quite realized,
even though in the hearts of a modest percentage of the population, as
can be most safely asserted, this has been a dominant and moving ideal.
Perhaps its realization is not within the possibilities of life. We are
all slaves essentially, and there have as yet been no measures devised
whereby strong and weak people will not be generated at one and the same
time side by side. But it is useless to say to the average American that
democracy is a dream and can never be realized. He will never believe
it. Wars come and go. Strong men arise and plot and conquer and
disappear. Weak men fail, and the poor are as much put upon here as
anywhere and ignored and laughed at; but in spite of all these facts
which endure in the face of every dream--of love, heaven, perfect
happiness as well as perfect liberty--the American goes on dreaming his
sweet dream, and will. Perhaps he already has all the democracy there
will ever be, because he believes that he has it.
Millions of Americans born on this soil or arriving here from other
lands believe thus. With them it was and perhaps still is a glowing and
enlivening thought that whether they were or not they were supposed to
be free. Their children and their children’s children somehow are to be
heirs to a magnificent and comforting land, one over which a wise and
generous form of government, the fruit of the dreams and genius of their
forefathers, their generosity and social aspiration, is to rule and
ensure all the blessings for which they had hoped and fought.
Well and good. The thing has substance enough even now in the face of
some setbacks and because of virgin soil and boundless untouched
opportunities, unharassed by war or slavery, which offer to physical
labor as well as to the imagination of those who come or who went before
us, great opportunity. Their success hitherto has been written into our
songs, our books, the public messages of our statesmen and patriots.
Even to this day, many who lack even a shadow of the substance of these
dreams are still dreaming, if not in their reality at least in their
possibility and eventuality here. I in my youth was one of these. I saw
in America what many others around me seemed to see: i. e., many if not
all of the things for which our forefathers fought and bled: generous,
protective and encouraging laws in all walks of life; an amazingly free
and unterrified press; a warm, sympathetic and encouraging educational
system reaching down to the poorest and humblest child and helping it to
rise and better its station; a real political referendum or ballot
system by which all projected laws and movements for the betterment and
control of the impulses and tendencies of the people were formulated and
with their consent;--and these seemed real enough.
Well?
Well, I still think we have a modicum of these things. The pressure of
the strong upon the weak is as yet not too grinding perhaps, and let us
hope may never be, although it is daily becoming sharper. The poor are
being put upon while being loudly told that they are not--fed on air and
kind words, as it were. The powerful are learning that the poor, here as
elsewhere, are either fools or, being poor, may not help themselves; a
very dangerous state of mind to begin with, I think.
* * * * *
Yes, in recent years a certain change has come over the spirit of our
original dreams. Our bright morning sky has been overcast with something
that was by no means foreseen by the charming and gracious idealists who
framed our Constitution and, better yet, our ideals. America, ungracious
as it may seem on the part of one who has prospered well enough in it,
is neither so free nor so liberal as many imagined it would be. Our
press, our school system, our laws, our political methods--do these
today answer to the incisive aspiration which was characteristic, or at
least was supposed to be characteristic, of the spirit of those who
generated the American Republic?
Let us see.
The fact is that what is supposed to be and what is true of American
history are two very different things. Because as a people we have
instinctively craved some things and have written it into a Constitution
that man is inalienably entitled to them, it does not follow that we
have them; although most Americans, I am inclined to fear, think so. If
I read American history aright, the men who drew up the Declaration of
Independence and framed our Constitution were men who, like ourselves
today, were in the grip of an ideal which had very little to do with
their own condition or the actual working necessities and conditions of
life as seen about them. Far from being democratic at that time America
was quite the reverse, a most stratified and nobility-aping nation with
feudal servants and thralls at the bottom and landed and all but titled
proprietors at the top (“History of the Great American Fortunes,”
Myers). But those same leaders and many followers appear to have been in
the grip of a time-spirit or movement which had its roots as far back in
time as the thirteenth century, when Europe seemed to give new birth or
breath to the pagan spirit and to revolt at the mummery and flummery of
kings and the gorgeous paraphernalia of a religious idea run completely
to seed. Hess and Bruno were but the fore-steppers of Luther. Bacon,
Locke, Voltaire, de Tocqueville, Rousseau and Paine, had much to do with
the spirit of our American Constitution. Indeed, it is a question
whether the latter six, and especially Rousseau with his “Social
Contract,” his dream of a new social arrangement in which the State
should do so much more than it had ever before attempted to do for its
constituent units, are not the makers of the Declaration of
Independence. Yet nothing that Paine, Voltaire, Locke or Rousseau
dreamed or believed concerning the essential capacity of man to govern
himself is absolutely true. What is true is that autocracy or
single-headed government without genius and a love of humanity is
closely allied, or very likely to be, to tyranny; whereas democracy or
multiple-headed rotation in control is likely to prove even more
dangerous where it is merely dull. It has not even the advantage of
being spectacular and interesting. Whether the individual, thus
protected against tyranny, is likely to prove a greater and more useful
engine or mechanism for the development of more and better thought, more
beautiful dreams and ideals than the world ever had before, remains to
be seen. Dominant America, now in the saddle of the world, has an
opportunity to prove this.
But does history provide a single analogy? Scarcely. The older nations
were not built so much for the individual, that he might have life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness guaranteed him, as for the
perpetuation and glory of the State itself, or the King thereof. This
was true of Athens and Sparta as well as the Roman Republic, and more
recently of Germany. It is very doubtful whether the modern republic is
made any more for the humble, single individual than the old-time
kingdom. Is not the modern trust-magnate or money-baron who taxes and
drives him by his wage arrangements and food extortion as much of a
King, or at least a medieval baron, as any such that ever lived? Take
Rockefeller, for example. How different is he, or others like
him--Morgan, for instance--to the Dons who in combination ruled Spain,
laughing at its King, or the money-lords who direct the policy of
England today, as did their equivalents in Russia and Germany before the
late war?
The truth is that it is given to few, if any, individuals of a nation to
understand it. By some it is assumed that the individual must rule. By
others the mass. Neither is true. The mass at times must be pitted
against the individual, and vice versa. But neither must disappear
entirely. That would spell death or slumber. It is also a question
whether any nation at any time ever collectively understands itself. Do
not some portions of its units always misunderstand other portions? Take
our part in the late great war. Sentimentally, a fair portion of
America’s integral units assumed that we entered the war to “free
humanity from slavery” and “to make the world safe for democracy,” a
very large order; but, to quote one of President Wilson’s later
utterances, it was for a somewhat different purpose, namely, “the
destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can separately and
secretly and of single choice disturb the peace of the world.” Well,
that is not exactly the same as making it safe for democracy--but
still--. The truth probably is that the nation, propelled by its
instinct for self-preservation, entered the war to make America safe. It
is not at all unlikely that sooner or later we should have gone to war
with Germany had there been no European war. Germany was known to regard
with avid eye many phases of this Western hemisphere, its resources,
institutions, pretensions; so America very practically, however
sentimental the reasons given may be, engaged herself on the side of
four or five powers of the first rank (some long friendly, others not
uniformly so) to protect her future interests.
From a practical point of view there were, and of course were sure to
be, many who disagreed with the somewhat sentimental interpretation of
all this. More than one person of authority at the time privately
ventured the opinion that in giving so much to aid Europe something
should have been done to secure for America its future integrity in the
Western hemisphere. “In so far as Mexico, Canada, the West Indies and
the Pacific are concerned,” wrote one authority, “should not everything
be done to further our interests there?” Canada, one would say, thinking
of a nation that should be looking reasonably well after its own
welfare, should be made at least sovereign--that is, independent of
Great Britain--and compelled to enter into commercial and definite
offensive and defensive alliances with us; the forts along our borders
dismantled and all plans to oppose us at any future time set aside.
Again, all of the West Indies, so it was argued, now controlled by
European powers, should have been exacted or made independent under our
protection so as not to fall into the hands of our enemies in the
future. Should not, asked some, a halt have been called to European
aggression in China, the open door insisted upon?... The seas should
have been made absolutely neutral--policed by America, along with
others. A great, even dominant, merchant marine should have been built
up. Why the expenditure of endless blood and treasure, with no definite
strength added to the point of view--which the United States
represents--the right of her ideas as well as those of other people to
prosper and grow strong?
But witness what was actually done, where our chief interests lay:
Belgium, a country that had never been a completely sovereign State with
rights which were inalienable, but a State which was the product of the
fears of Europe, commanding our sympathies as though it had been
individual and free throughout history. It was torn from Holland by
England and France only as recently as 1830. England and France chose
its reigning house--the English Queen’s uncle, who was speedily married
to the daughter of the King of France. Yet with Ireland, India, Egypt,
the Philippines, the Boer Republic and other violated lands and
nationalities before us, the woes of this one country developed our
greatest interest. Japan guaranteed the neutrality of Korea, but annexed
it with the consent of the powers. England, before our very eyes,
suppressed attempts at “self-determination by smaller nations of their
rights” in Egypt, Ireland, India, the Boer Republic. Yet we thought
nothing, or at least did nothing. Yet the Balkans, for some peculiar
reason not easily to be explained, aroused another sentimental emotion
in us. Although one would have said the interest of America in the
question of what should become of Russia, Turkey and the Balkans was not
direct, and from an old-time practical and political point of view never
could be, yet America interfered there as elsewhere, laying down, or
attempting to, a rule for the future organization of Europe
(self-determination of nations!), and that without any referendum to the
American voter, any definite constitutional inquiry as to what _he_
thought of all this.
Yet the neglect of the latter, most important in a self-determining
democracy or republic, one would suppose, was passed over as nothing,
while it was assumed or preached by those in the lead, and in the face
of much repressed grumbling, that we were engaged unquestionably with
those who were nearest to and best for us intellectually, spiritually
and in every other way, nations which would seek, or had invariably
sought our welfare in the past. But history, of course, demonstrated
that this was not true and that such alliances were only momentarily
beneficial, if at all, and later were broken without so much as a
by-your-leave or a farewell. But did this serve to alter the state of
public feeling or illusion? By no means. In so far as England was
concerned it appeared to strengthen it, although this was the first time
she had ever been on our side (1776, 1812, 1865, 1896); (1897-8, the
Boer War). In all those instances we were anything but pro-British. So
again with France in 1788 and 1815, when we practically declared war on
her in favor of England, although she had reason to expect our sympathy
and aid. Our attitude toward Italy has varied, as it has toward Russia:
now friendly, now the reverse. Taking into consideration the brevity of
all international alliances one would have supposed that it would have
been the imperative duty of American statesmen to make sure that in the
course of a temporary alliance with European powers the best interests
of the American nation would not have been imperiled, but being powerful
and optimistic we assumed that our interests were safe enough, or, if
not, that we could make them so, and let it go at that. But supposing we
had not been so powerful? Would God, Justice, Mercy, Truth, Progress and
a number of other things invoked during the great argument, have been on
our side? All failure, some one has said, is due to but two things:
weakness and error. Suppose we had been weak? Or foolish?
* * * * *
A singular thing in connection with this same great war and the American
people, their history, is the attitude of this nation toward the
French, at this time and earlier. At the beginning of the war
America--Christian America--was decidedly opposed to the French, on
moral and intellectual grounds, their literature, their art, their
stage, their vile tendencies to naturalism in thought and deed. Even
before this, at the beginning of our history, the original Colonists,
although of various nationalities--English, French, Dutch, Swedish,
Spanish--were finally consolidated under English rule and a fairly
systematic warfare waged against the French and the Indians, whom both
the French and the English were employing by turns in their contest for
supremacy. Yet later, at the time of the dispute between the English and
the American Colonies, which ended in the Revolutionary War, French
sympathy, due to ancient antipathy to England as well as the intense
opposition to autocratic oppression in France, drew the Americans and
the French together in a bond of sympathy. The French sent various
Generals and Admirals (Rochambeau, Lafayette, Count d’Estaing, Count de
Grasse) to help the Americans on land and sea. Yet in 1788-9, when
France and Spain declared war on England, and especially later (after
the French Revolution in 1789) when the French were struggling to
maintain their democratic independence and England was seeking to put
the Bourbon rulers back on the throne of France, do you believe that
American sympathy was with the French? If you do, you don’t know
American history. Under the offensive and defensive agreement or treaty
entered into between France and the Colonies in 1778, when the latter
were struggling for their independence, it was confidently expected by
the French that the Americans would help them against England, but
nothing of the sort followed. When, in the belief that America must
sympathize with France, “democratic” societies, after the French model,
were organized throughout the States, and later Genet, the French
Minister to America, attempted to fit our privateers on American soil
and to establish admiralty ports for the condemnation of prizes, there
was great opposition to this. Only read the history of that period
(Burgess: “The Middle Period”; Babcock: “American Nationality”; Hart:
“American History Told by Contemporaries”). America, according to this
new attitude, was now to look out for itself, and in consonance with
this in 1793 Washington issued his famous Neutrality Proclamation,
leaving France to take care of herself. After the issuance of the
Proclamation, Genet, still believing that American sympathy must be with
France, appealed to the people and openly defied the Government. His
recall followed, of course.
Then followed a very curious state of affairs. The French
Revolutionists, angered by the official attitude of America, fell to
attacking American shipping, looking upon it as a hostile power aiding
England. American commissionaires, sent to adjust our relations with
France, were ignored and representatives of the Revolutionists (or so it
was claimed), using the initials “X Y Z,” demanded tribute and a bribe.
Hence the famous comment of William Pinckney, the American lawyer and
statesman, who said “Millions for defense, but not one cent for
tribute.” And that against our late ally, France!
President Adams laid the correspondence before Congress, and the whole
country was aroused. War with France was thought to be inevitable and
(1798) Washington was reappointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army. Owing
to the activity of French sympathizers in America and rabid criticisms
in the newspapers of the Government’s stand in this matter, the
Federalists, who were then in power and who had no sympathy for France,
secured the passage (1798) of the famous Alien and Sedition Laws. These
laws gave the Government power to banish “foreigners” (meaning the
French) from the country and to suppress obnoxious newspapers. Actual
warfare with France went on upon the sea! But these laws, being against
the then “fundamental ideas” of Americans in regard to free speech and
the right of asylum to immigrants, were regarded by enough of the people
as proving all the charges of tyranny urged against the Federalists, and
at the next election (1800) they were defeated. In the meantime Virginia
and Kentucky had resolved, owing to these same Alien and Sedition Laws,
that a State might nullify a law of the United States. Congress, because
of French attacks on our shipping, formulated the “Spoliation Claims,”
and it was not until Napoleon (1800), as First Consul of France, agreed
to abandon the French Claim that America was still bound by the treaty
of 1778 to aid her that these latter were abandoned and peace reached.
In other words, we refused France aid in her most trying hour. Yet
twelve years later, because of England’s continuous attacks upon our
ships and seamen, trying to prevent our dealing with France in any way,
we went to war with her--only she did not quit until the victory over
Napoleon removed the cause of her alleged grievances. One hundred years
later, as we have just seen (1914-19), although opposition to France on
moral grounds had been steadily growing in America, still in the contest
with Germany all the refused sympathy and gratitude of 1800 was revived
and France became once more the object of our tenderest solicitude. So
much for national moods and gratitudes.
* * * * *
Another curious phase of the late great war, as of all countries and
wars perhaps, but one which illustrates the American temperament rather
clearly, was the attitude of America to one and another phase of it, the
psychologic flounderings and back somersaults, as it were, concerning
one problem and another. For one thing, as we all perhaps remember, the
preliminary internal contest was for peace at any price practically, and
any one who suggested mobilizing a large army for self-defense (if
nothing more) was, if not a traitor, something of an undesirable
citizen. Mr. Wilson, if you will recall, was elected the second time on
the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War”; also before we entered the war we
were told what a blessing it was in one way, commercially at least.
Later, as Germany appeared to be winning and America was actually
threatened, the whole world had to be made “safe for democracy,” an
order so large that publicity was quietly refused it in all countries
outside the United States. But that was the sweet milk fed to Americans.
Later still, when it came to actually declaring war, although this is a
republic and the people are supposed to have a voice in deciding that
which they do, no willingness on the part of the authorities, executive
or legislative, to refer the matter back to the people for a vote, was
in evidence.
And once war was declared, the people were allowed or compelled to “take
out” whatever opposition they might feel in private thought, not public
or open opposition. It was openly admitted that a referendum might have
prevented a declaration of war, yet afterwards public complaint was
ruggedly suppressed--by the courts and officials, if not by the whole
people, astounding farces by way of law being perpetrated. Still later
on, when it came to “raising” troops, money and supplies (controlling
food), volunteer service in the first of these fields was swiftly
abandoned, and conscription, with all which that implied in the way of
force and putting down opposition to it, free speech as well as free
action, was used. “Public sentiment,” as fostered by an administrative
press bureau, to say nothing of much foreign propaganda, controlled or
overawed the papers. Overawing sentences, such as forty years in the
penitentiary, for circulating a pamphlet in opposition to the current
will of the Government, were uniformly handed down in all parts of the
nation by a judiciary whose independence, sanctity and what not were
supposed to be the bulwark of American liberty. But at whose request?
By what authority? The necessity of strict and impartial justice?
I am not quarreling with the process; I am showing the thin line of
difference between autocracy and democracy where necessity or passing
opinion favors one course of conduct or another. Later on, when
suggestions in regard to food-saving were rather freely ignored, the
“suggestions” became not only suggestions but restrictions and, to quote
the food administrator, “the restrictions will be voluntary, _but_ any
evasion will result in compulsory enforcement.” Similarly in connection
with bond-selling; the people were to lend and lend and lend because
they loved their country, but (I am quoting a leading administrative
organ) “the period has arrived (October, 1918) to discontinue wooing and
soft-soaping. God help the man who is found with filled pockets if the
war goes on because of a financial failure here.”
And it was not alone in such matters where some independence or at least
latitude might have been presupposed, but it extended to a press
censorship and an intolerance of opposing opinion which compared rather
favorably to darkest days of Russian autocracy. Although America is
always naïve and “free,” its innumerable blessings of tolerance and the
like prated of, still there was but one _publicly endured_ opinion in
relation to the conduct of the war, and that was pro-war. Any other form
of thought was rigidly put down, although in England and France one
might say one’s say with all but destructive freedom. One woman in New
York was actually fined for saying that “Ireland was as good as England
any day!” A booklet entitled “Shall Morgan Own the Earth?” and intended
to show how the war was profiting some individuals, was first
investigated by the Department of Justice and pronounced immune, then
later the author was urged “as a patriotic duty” to change the title;
still later, even under the milder title, it was refused the privilege
of the mails by the Postoffice Department and the author warned that
“to circulate it would subject you to ten years in prison. You know it
violates the Espionage Law.”
And to what astounding fol-de-rol in regard to the conduct of all wars
in the future, if not in the past, were we not treated! There were to be
no more brutal wars of any kind anywhere. Ever! Oddly enough, the
horrors of the Civil War, especially the part of the Northern soldiers
in it, were entirely forgotten; also the “water cure” and “Hell Roaring
Jake Smith” of the Philippine campaign were forgotten--those natives,
for instance, who were stood up in rows and shot down one after another
by an officer with a revolver or who had water poured down their throats
and into their noses until they died of strangulation, because they
could not, or did not choose to, reveal that which possibly they did not
even know. Nations as well as individuals have short memories. Before we
entered the war it really looked as though a great war must necessarily
be fought with tooth-brushes, so great was the opposition to brutality.
Later we were never to fight any more wars at all, or if we did it was
all to be ended by one war. A little later one of our greatest agonies
was that we could not visit on the enemy something much more terrible
than they were visiting on us--national annihilation, no less. We could
not live in peace with autocracy--although, forsooth, we could live in
peace with the Japanese, the Chinese, the Imperial Russian Government
before it fell, England in India, England in Egypt--anything and
everything, indeed, save with a nation that did not fight as we did.
Never again were the erring nations to be restored to their old place in
the world. Between chortles over an immense trade increase, a finally
united railway system, new and better methods of food control, intensive
agriculture, lessons in self-denial and thought, still, and idiotic as
it may seem, the war was an unmixed evil; the Germans were all wrong.
“The passage of a thousand years will not obliterate the memory of
Germany’s crime. She will get her good name back when Judas does.” (I am
quoting from the Cincinnati Enquirer of March, 1918.) And this in the
face of the above-recited blessings pointed out in this very paper! What
are you to say for such a ragbag point of view, a national intelligence
that can blow hot and cold with the same breath?
Actually, it looked for a time as though America were suffering from
pernicious mental anemia. Its whole original significance as a
forward-pushing, clear-thinking nation appeared to have been clouded
over, and, not unlike the bee and the coral insect which apparently
serve only one or two purposes in life--the one to gather honey and
pollenize the flowers, the other to build a coral island--that it had
been invented by Nature to devise and manufacture machinery which it
should never have the courage or brains to apply to the limits of their
possibilities. It was as though the Germans and the English and the
Japanese, seeing the peculiar gifts and mental limitations of the
American, were to be permitted to use his gifts, quite as we use the
stored labor of the bee or the coral insect, and leave him to go on
moiling in his brainless mechanistic way. For the average American, who
could so easily invent a flying machine, a submarine, a range-finder for
guns, a revolving turret, a steel-protected battleship, a steamboat, and
what not, was being urged to believe, at first, that he had no heart for
their use and that he was “too proud to fight” or lacked the courage to
face the horrible grinding necessities of life; later that he was the
greatest fighter of all. Only, having proved that, he was still to
believe that he was here only to save the world, never by any chance to
further his own interests. His great inventions were to be put aside
like toys or sold to others or reserved for moral purposes only.
For note, up to the hour of sheer tragic compulsion, everything was,
and no doubt still is, to the average American, a matter of morality,
and morality, take note, in the limited sense in which he understood and
appreciated morals up to that time. You might invent a battleship
wherewith to defend yourself and kill other people, but if you used it
for any but a Christian or moral purpose, or the enemy who was
non-Christian got it (and used it) it was terrible, shameful, a moral
crime, not to be blotted out by a thousand years of expiation. To an
American, a machine, however deadly in intention, or its method of
slaying, was not to be used unless some distinctly moral end was to be
achieved by it. And he was to judge as to the moral end involved. But,
to his horror, he was finding and did find that the savage and the pagan
could get hold of his machine gun or his flying machine, or submarine,
or his battleship, or chemic invention of any kind, and turn it on him
without any moral compunction whatsoever--and to his still further
Christian horror it worked just as well for the savage or the pagan as
it did for him. Nature, or God, did not prevent the submarine from
discharging a torpedo at an unarmed merchantman any more than it aided
the firing of one from a Christian submarine at a pagan battleship. In
short, Nature seemed to be without Christianity or Christian morals, and
this shocked the American terribly. He found that he had to lay aside,
for the time being anyhow, his fine-spun theories and fight in any way
that he could, and he proceeded to do so. Whereupon, he won. But to the
American, nevertheless, and in spite of all this, Nature was and is
still strictly moral. She has fixed, definite and Christian ways by
which she works. Whenever the good American by any chance discovers that
Nature is betraying him in any way, not working according to the code as
handed down at Sinai, or the Mount in Palestine, he is horror-stricken!
What! Nature not working according to the Ten Commandments? The weak do
not inherit the earth? “Thou shalt not kill” not a universal law? “Thou
shalt not steal or commit adultery” not chemic or psychic truth running
through all nature? Who says so? Where is our God who told us these
things? Why does he not act in our behalf? Why does he not confound the
enemy in his blasphemies, destroy him, for flouting these fundamental
religious truths?
But behold, God does not, or did not act until the Americans, bestirring
themselves and laying aside their theorizing, proceeded to fight as do
the heathen. Then and then only, with the moral and exegetic rust rubbed
off and the good American, standing up vital and dangerous, did the tide
turn. Up to that hour the tide was indifferently going against him. The
heathen, noting his mood, had picked up the American’s subtle inventions
where he laid them down--fine, powerful, complete but immoral
instruments--and had used them for “immoral” purposes. And the machines
and the schemes of the American, moral though he thought they were,
worked just as well for the unmoral heathen as for himself. To his
pathetic horror and utter Christian decay he found that if he was to
succeed at all he must not only invent subtle and deadly things, but
apply them in the same spirit in which he invented them or other people
would--horrific Nature, working through other non-Christian nations
quite as effectively as it worked through good Christian Americans. In
other words, Nature was not Christian, not moral, in the sense that a
race or an organized society working to protect its selfish internal
arrangements and comforts may be, and no amount of energetic spouting on
this score helped him in the least. Nature, or God, or what you will,
showed that it cared no whit, not a snap of her or his fingers, what
becomes of man or an American with his theories, religious or otherwise,
unless he was able to protect himself. A man or a nation had to have
wealth and power to survive, and if the Germans had had more power they
would have survived, methods or means to the contrary notwithstanding.
Ten thousand pagan shrines did not save Rome from the pacifist
destruction which Christianity involved. Ten million Christian churches
spouting peace and non-warlike ways could not and did not save America
or any other country from a nation which put its faith in war and the
ruthless forces of Nature herself. Only greater war on our part could do
that, and did.
* * * * *
But let us consider some of America’s other equally potent and definite
moods or opinions in regard to some other things: the negro for one. By
the year 1700 slavery, which up to that time had been more or less a
matter of individual preference or taste, there being no general
Colonial agreement in regard to it, had become an economic institution
in Colonial life. A legalized status of Indian, white and negro servants
had preceded slavery in almost all, if not all, the English-maintained
colonies; but apparently it paid to make them slaves, and they were so
made in spite of the legal fact that they were not. Later the difference
in the industries of the several States made slavery more desirable in
some States than in others, and then the natural boundary lines of the
slave territory began to develop. Georgia and South Carolina especially
were clamoring for slave-labor on the tobacco, cotton and rice
plantations; whereas in the North it was found to be an unsatisfactory
system, and so there was early developed in those Colonies a sentiment
against a negro population and the institution of slavery in general. It
cannot be said that this was due entirely to the economic disadvantage
of keeping slaves in the North--there always existed some opposition to
slavery in the minds of individuals--but would it have been effective if
slave labor had been profitable--as profitable, say, as it was in the
South? Jefferson, for instance, wrote a denunciation of slavery into his
draft of the Declaration of Independence, but later, owing to its
probable effect on slave-holding Colonies, erased it. And negroes were
freely lynched and burned in New York City in 1712 and 1741 because they
were suspected of a desire to rebel against slavery. A public
slave-market was established in New York City as early as 1709!
Yet to hear the average Christian American of today or earlier talk of
slavery and its horrors and the great war fought to free the negro, you
might assume that he liked him. Far from it. Although a Northern
Congress (March 2d, 1867) attempted to impose universal manhood suffrage
on the South and (1875) passed a law forbidding discrimination against
negroes in inns, public conveyances, theaters and other places, aimed
principally at the South, still the negro has never been accepted in the
spirit of these laws either in the North or South. In any residence
neighborhood anywhere in America, when the black man begins to come in
the whites move out. Excellent as he may be, and I have known many who
were wholly admirable, he is not even wanted in the same churches or
schools. And the feeling, instead of growing less, becomes stronger.
Almost daily he is burned alive somewhere in America, and for all but
indifferent crimes. America may have fought and bled for his physical
freedom, but she does not want him about; and when, as in 1917 in East
St. Louis, employers attempted to use him to break a strike, he was
murdered (117 of him in that instance), his homes burned, his wives and
children driven out of the region; and in the far South, where one of
him has even so much as insulted a deputy sheriff, he has been done to
death, he and his entire family. Yet the American has no plan for the
negro--his threatening future here. He merely allows the question to go
begging, trusting to luck, no doubt. Puzzle: does the American citizen
want the negro, or doesn’t he?
* * * * *
Take once more the matter of the American and the idle, greedy or
predatory rich, as you please, and their attitude toward America, all
being citizens of the same land. Because a Colonial American once wrote
it down in our Declaration of Independence that men are created free and
equal, that they are, and _of right_ ought to be, entitled to life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness at the hands of their
fellow-citizens and the world, the American ever since has been amazed
and troubled by the curious human or chemic contradictions of and
oppositions to this, not only in others but himself. Struggling along
trying to be free and happy he finds that he is constantly interfered
with by others who are doing the same thing, and that, Declaration of
Independence or no Declaration of Independence, the curious fact remains
that the strong, the ruthless, the shrewd get along as well here as they
do anywhere and that they are constantly developing ways and means of
undermining him and foreshortening his peace and happiness in favor of
their own.
Thus, in illustration: (1) A Federal judge (1919) ruled that although
Congress (1918) had forbidden any one to compel children of ten or more
years of age to labor in cotton mills, still it was unconstitutional for
Congress so to forbid and those who wished could so employ children.
Result, hundreds of thousands of children returned to eleven hours per
day factory labor.
(2) A New Jersey judge, one Gumere by name, ruled (1900) that a child’s
life, lost in an accident on a railroad or other public conveyance, was
not worth more than one dollar, the child not being as yet a source of
profit to its parents.
(3) An Ohio circuit judge (William H. Taft, afterwards President of the
United States) ruled (1893) that quitting work without the consent of
the employer was a criminal offense on the part of an employee.
(4) The Federal Supreme Court ruled (1908) that arbitration in labor
disputes is unconstitutional, therefore something which an employer may
not even enter upon with his employees.
(5) The Oregon Supreme Court decided (1903) that a citizen might be
legally held in duress (jailed) for one month without trial--this in the
face of explicit prohibition on the part of the American Constitution.
(6) The Massachusetts Supreme Court held in one dispute (1906) that
where conditions are unsatisfactory there is no remedy open to labor
save by individual and personal suit; union or combined action being
illegal or unconstitutional.
(7) Four magnates, two of them controlling the production and two the
distribution of milk for and in New York City, decided (January 10,
1919) that since they could not agree as to how the profits of the sale
of milk in New York City were to be divided among them, New York was to
have no milk until they could agree. Time of city without milk, one
month.
(8) One Barnet Baff, wholesale chicken merchant in New York City, was
murdered because he would not enter upon a scheme with other
chicken-wholesalers to fix prices and extort a higher profit from the
public. Secondary executors, but not primary instigators or murderers,
were caught and electrocuted.
(9) In Lachnor vs. New York (198 U. S. 45) a majority of the judges of
the New York Court of Appeals held unconstitutional a law limiting the
hours of labor of bakers, many of whom (women) were forced to toil
twelve hours daily in cellars to earn wages barely sufficient to keep
them alive. The Court held that this law was void because it interfered
with freedom of contract.
(10) In Ives vs. South Buffalo Ry. Co. (94 N. E. R. 431), a case in
which a railroad employee, crippled for life while at work and without
“contributory negligence,” sued for recompense, the New York Court of
Appeals unanimously decided that the law under which the suit was
brought was unconstitutional. The judges admitted the injustice, since
the man was helpless, but held the Constitution responsible.
... One might thus go forward for pages. I merely cite these in order to
present a few definite instances. The truth is that while the average
American imagines he is better looked after and more free here than he
would be elsewhere, it is more a matter of thought than anything else.
As to his daily earning and living capacity, while it is true that he
gets more pay he also pays more for what he buys. A rising scale of
wages has so regularly been accompanied by a lowering of the purchasing
power of the dollar that he has not been much comforted by higher wages.
In fact, the National Department of Labor (February, 1919), after
studying family budgets in various cities of the country, announced that
the then exorbitant cost of necessities bore heaviest on incomes of one
thousand dollars or _less_, although five per cent of the population
controlled ninety-five per cent of the wealth of the nation. And one
should further note the rising Protection policy of a hundred years,
under which the trusts flourished without any notable increase of wages
to the local consumer, and the local consumer paid uniformly higher
prices than those paid by foreigners for the same grade of goods, often
the very same goods made here and shipped abroad. This protection
explains the American multi-millionaire; also the American beggar and
his slum. It also explains the profiteer. If the average American has
had a little more of food and clothes than the men of some other
countries, he has also been confronted by the very irritating spectacle
of thousands upon thousands who have so much more than he has or can
get. He has been made to appear as poor as any churchmouse anywhere,
and, worst of all, his woes get but small attention from those who,
financially able to control his only medium of expression, the
newspapers, insist upon telling him that he is well and happy. If any
one should doubt this, let him consult, for one thing, the report of the
Federal Trade Commission appointed by Congress (Report handed down June,
1918), wherein it was charged and proved that large exactions and safe
profiteering permitted more than one giant concern to double, treble,
even quintuple, its capitalization and still earn from 100 to 227 per
cent in one instance. Coal, valued at five cents a ton in the ground,
was being sold for twenty-two dollars a ton in New York--not over two
hundred and fifty miles away. Milk was shoved up rapidly from seven to
seventeen-and-one-half cents a quart, and with no interference on the
part of any one and no effort to pool the wasteful competition and
duplication of systems which, on the other hand, were offered as an
excuse for the necessity of the more than 100 per cent increase. Wheat,
potatoes, meat, oil, sugar rose in proportion. There was no
corresponding increase in the wages, save to unionized labor (which was
the only form of labor in a position to demand a just share, and which
constituted but ten per cent of all employed). And these had to indulge
in three hundred and sixty-seven strikes in the first three years of the
war to effect even so much as a twenty per cent increase. (I am quoting
figures furnished by the United States Bureau of Labor.) When complaint
was made, one enthusiastic retort on the part of a corporation press was
that the natural law of supply and demand must be allowed to work, that
interference with exhorbitant prices meant curtailment of production at
the source. The poor producer, robbed of his just right to high prices
under a strenuous demand, would become discouraged and quit! On the
other hand, the producer was constantly complaining that he was getting
little more than before, while the rapidly increasing cost of labor was
cited as proving the need of a from 100 to a 1000 per cent increase on
everything--shoes, clothes, food, rent.
That is all simple and interesting enough when one accepts human nature
for what it is: a thing of rough balances and equations only or a
catch-as-catch-can struggle in which the strong or the shrewd survive
and the weak go under. But when, in the same land in which these things
occur, the air is full of a huge hubbub over the extreme merits of
democracy, and when at the same time any one who says anything against
profiteering or intimates that democracy as such may be subject to at
least some of the faults of autocracy is looked upon as an enemy, if not
an enemy alien, it becomes slightly anachronistic, to say the least.
* * * * *
It is also a matter of pride with most of us, frequently expressed in
disparagement of our European contemporaries, that we are a nation of
workers. To hold a position in any American community, so the thought
runs, a man must have a job. We do not conceal our contempt for the chap
who fails to go down to an office or a business every day. Often, of
course, our ostentatious _workers_ do go down but do very little work.
Still, somehow it is felt by the public at large that every man owes it
to the community or the nation to put in from six to ten hours outside
of the residential district doing something, if no more than twiddling
his thumbs. Hence the huge commuting armies oscillating to and fro,
between home and office or factory. And yet can it be said that American
commercial activity is so immensely more profitable than that of any
other nation? Or even as much so? During the late great war it was
actually proved that both Germany and England had shrewder and more
profitable business schemes and methods. The German plan for national
co-operative buying was one. Again, the superior efficiency of the
Germans and even the English was one of the facts which burst like a
flash of lightning out of a clear sky upon the astonished American, the
instantaneous skill with which all national resources--food, clothing,
transportation, man-power--were mobilized and put at the services of
the nation, the relative cheapness of it all, the efficiency with which
it was maneuvered once it was in the hands of the Government. Yet the
American business man as well as the American executive, while English
and French Commissionaires were instructing our factory masters and
“Captains of Industry,” had been bustling down to his desk each day, his
telephone to his ear, or racing from one directors’ meeting to
another--and the result to America was the largest war debt per capita
for time of service in the war and number of men involved of any nation
in the world, not even excepting Russia. Question: Is the American
business man as efficient as we think he is? As honest? As patriotic? Is
he?
* * * * *
Another curiosity of American character is, or was before the war, its
adoration of all things foreign. Everything abroad was, if it is not
now, excellent, priceless, beyond all praise or blame; whereas anything
native, or even occidental, was more or less worthless or
inconsiderable--even such things as the Andes and Amazon, as contrasted
with the Alps and the Nile; Brazil and Argentina, Mexico and the
Canadian snows were as nothing compared to Belgium or Turkey, the
Riviera, Asia, Africa. One cannot help smiling a little at times at the
grand manner with which the only moderately equipped foreigner,
intellectually or otherwise, has been permitted to walk abroad in
America and either sniff at or patronize all with which he comes in
contact as though it were nothing. And the pathetic desire of the
American to live up to what foreigners expected of him--even the waiters
of France or the middle class or gentry of England. And as for the
English lord, the French or Italian count, the Austrian or even German
baron, the Spanish grandee, the Russian prince or Turkish pasha--it is
folly to deny that he was--may be even yet, for all one knows--overcome
by his attentions. To the American they were inherently better, in some
strange sense, more versed in the ways of that great world which he
longed to explore. Let a restaurant advertise a French cuisine or cook;
a tailor say he is English; a beauty-parlor or dressmaker that it or she
or he is of Paris; a writer or artist that he is of French, Russian,
Italian, English extraction--creak goes the American knee and instanter
your native American is down on his marrowbones, his eyes rolled
heavenward. Of Paris! Of London! Of Rome! Of St. Petersburg! Of Vienna!
Ah! How many American fortunes have been re-banked in Europe to the
order of the thinnest of noble pretensions! What millions have not been
expended in an all but useless effort to take on the color and surface
veneer of European manners and culture! To this day a foreign make of
car, watch, cloth, is inherently better than that of any American
manufacture. Formerly foreign plays practically excluded the American
product--and rightly enough, in my judgment. We have been “raised” on
the foreign book, the foreign picture, the foreign object of art. The
Swiss, French or Austrian Alps--how for a hundred years at least have
they not outrivaled everything America has to offer!
And well enough, perhaps, since as yet America has no intellectual
atmosphere, no native art force wherewith to present its claim, even to
itself. A drab, and in places narrowly ignorant, people, imagining that
it is religious, moral, conservative--a thousand things that really it
is not. Since it is mental capacity that makes a country interesting to
itself and others, perhaps it is the drab attitude of the American
toward what he has and is which makes his land so uninteresting to
himself and others. Give him a different mental attitude, more
perspective, “punch,” daring in regard to life itself, and America would
soon take on a luster not outrivaled by that of any other land.
* * * * *
Let us contemplate in this connection another and, in so far as this
essay is concerned, final phase of the American mind--for I have
elsewhere dealt with moral narrowness--and that is his serious and, were
it not so pathetic and at times tragic, one might say, amusing, faith in
the ballot and what it will or can accomplish for him. Always, always he
is voting for some one--a mayor or a State legislator every year; a
congressman every two years, a senator every four or six; a governor
every two and a President every four years--and he is under the illusion
that thereby, by his vote, his choice of a candidate, he is running the
Government and maintaining his so-called liberties. The futility of his
vote in the late great war might have taught him something, if only he
were to be taught. To this day he has not discovered that, in the main,
he is merely voting for individuals thrust upon him by interests and
forces over which he has no control, never has had, and apparently never
can have, and the election or defeat of whom does not depend upon him or
the individuals about whom he is so excited. Mayors, governors, state
legislators, congressmen, senators, and even judges and presidents, come
and go, but the powerful interests at the top remain; and however much
the former may be imbued with a desire to do something for the rank and
file, the latter are there to revise or repress their emotions or
opinions, and the ordinary voter finds himself about where he was
before--of small force or weight in the vast welter of American
politics. In short, keen money-masters at the top long since learned
that a bare majority of votes anywhere, in or out of congress or a state
legislature, is sufficient to confer rule and that, apart from
convincing the intellect by sound argument, there were many, many ways
of bending the representatives of the people to their will. If this is
not true, how is it that five per cent of them have ninety-five per cent
of the wealth and the other ninety-five only five?
Those who have made a study of the history of the American judiciary
have stood in amaze before the evidence that nonelective branches of
the Government could so consistently, so openly and so contemptuously
undo the work of the elective branches (The Dred Scott decision; the
first nullification of the income tax; to cite only two). In what
American city would an outside corporation desiring real facilities or
privileges not deem itself lunatic not to see the individual local boss,
who holds no office of any kind but who is nevertheless the last
authority and can tell the local mayor and the local council, often the
local governor, what and how? And to whom does the local boss bow--the
local governor or national president? Not at all. He makes them, or
helps. He bows to but one force: money, the great national monied
interests, and none other. It is only when the financial powers at the
top fall out among themselves that the least of benefits accrue to the
people. It is always so, and has always been so. Equation--equation. The
monied individual against the mass; the mass against the monied
individual.
In what American city or state, pray, would a popular vote for any
franchise or improvement, however needful, be of any avail unless the
consent of the financial oligarchs at the top (in Wall Street
principally) were first obtained? So much is this a commonplace that
even the voters themselves would laugh at the suggestion of any power
lying in them to obtain any such thing. Before the Government
temporarily took over the railroads during the period of the great war,
Lucius Tuttle (a mere single illustration, this), president of the
Boston & Maine Railroad, controlled the political life of Maine, New
Hampshire and Vermont and lifted up or cast down, at his personal whim,
members of legislatures, governors, and United States senators. This is
a matter of record, not of rumor. The quondam Senator Chandler of New
Hampshire, one of the foremost senators of the nation of his day, was
thrown out of office on orders from Mr. Tuttle for the most
inconsequential exhibition of independence. And Mr. Tuttle took his
orders from Charles S. Mellen, president of the New York, New Haven &
Hartford Railroad; Mr. Mellen took his orders from J. Pierpont Morgan,
the elder, financial master of Wall Street. And Mr. Morgan took his
orders--from whom? God?
Is it not a commonplace of fact, recorded in every newspaper file in
America as well as every history worthy the name, that the Goulds,
Hills, Harrimans, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and such great banking
houses as Kuhn, Loeb & Company, absolutely ruled--via agents, attorneys,
lobbyists, paid legislators, governors and the like--the politics of the
states through which their roads passed? The little minnow voters
running here and there in schools might amuse themselves as they would
by voting for this, that or the other unimportant thing--a mayor, say,
or a governor or a president--but let any vital question appear,
something affecting the purse or privileges of the money-lords, and the
votes of the voters were cast out or miscounted, their elected
representatives suborned and made false to their oaths and pledges, the
judiciary ruled as the money interests dictated, the newspapers made to
cloud the issue with specious or false arguments, and even presidents
and parties faced about, leaving the dreaming, ambitious, hopeful voter
to dream on or to seek his so-called constitutional rights in some other
vain or ridiculous way. Money has always ruled America, and apparently
always will. As well ask five cents to contend with five billion dollars
as to ask an ordinary voter or business man of minor import to maintain
or obtain his so-called rights, privileges, hopes, dreams via the
ballot, or any other way. Even decent consideration for him or his
affairs from those above him financially has not in the main been
granted. He has been whipped and harried by the very rich as they chose;
and still, because he has the ballot and can go to the polls every once
in so often and cast it--and at such times as he is not whimpering over
his defeats--he imagines he rules!
* * * * *
The truth is that America has not as yet had an intelligence or a
culture worthy the name. It has no visible intellectual purpose, unless
it be that of getting money. What little so-called culture we have had,
if we have had any, has been borrowed from abroad--principally England,
which itself has needed to be revivified along the lines of true
culture; for it, too, as to its written and spoken professions at least,
has become puritan, pharisaic, religious and never has been democratic.
If you want to see America illustrated rather clearly as to its
cultural, or lack of cultural, results contemplate the American
millionaire. He had, if he has not now, the prevailing idea that money
is power; he worshiped and slaved for it in the hope that it would make
him wonderful in the eyes of all men.
But consider the pathetic result. He got it. A great war crisis arrived.
He wished to be useful with his great (and purely imaginary) power, to
do some significant thing which would help the world or at least his
country in its hour of stress. Had he the mental or spiritual equipment
to see or even feel what was needed? Or was he but one of that immense
class of American men and women who discovered in this crisis that
business somehow failed to fulfill their spiritual needs and reached out
from it, only to find themselves lost in a maze of wider relationships
for which they had no technique? Ford organized a peace ship! He, with a
little load of editors, journalists, preachers and what not, going to
Europe to “call the men out of the trenches by Christmas!” (1915). And
the wise American papers, especially in our Middle and Far West, full of
his praises, and the probability of success! It could be done! And that,
in the face of an amazing and subtle racial movement and propaganda,
with war and conquest as its under-stones, organizing in Germany since
the year 1813. The rest contented themselves with making more money. So
much for one American business giant’s success, and his intellectual
grasp on life!
* * * * *
Take yet another phase in conclusion. At the beginning of the great
world war we were constantly hearing talk of “the obligations laid upon
us,” “our duty to civilization,” the necessity for “making the world
safe for democracy,” when, as a matter of fact and according to our
chief spokesman’s own admission it was not until between the third and
fourth year of the war that we began to realize the true program or
purpose of the enemy and that some such enthusiasm as was at first
called for might be necessary! We talked of the time having come for us
“to play our part among the societies of the world”--and then sent a
Root and a Francis (corporation lawyers and agents both, and long since
discredited by the American people themselves) to argue with the
representatives of a torn and war-worn people seeking a new and better
form of social and political life. In the war itself it was apparently
assumed that “men, money and ships” (the old American idea of quantity,
you see, not ideas or wits wherewith to match the deepest schemes of our
adversaries as well as our friends) was the point. But life or
international politics and relations or diplomacy is something more than
that. It may, and did, require nothing less than a mobilization of new
characteristics and unique forces on the part of the pacifistic and
religious-minded American. It actually compelled him to open his brains
to the fact that life is more dark and mysterious than he had supposed,
more forceful and terrible and cruel than his petty little pacifistic
and puritanic dreams would previously have permitted him to believe. A
door was unlocked, a window opened, and looking out or in on the deeps
of Nature he saw--dimly enough even then, it must be admitted--what he
has not even yet digested; that Nature has no strict and God-given
rules, that nothing is really fixed; anything may arise, and that
within the bounds of an unknown arc of equation anything may
happen--anything.
But it took a world horror to crack the armor of smug, ignorant
self-sufficiency which has covered the average American from crown to
sole.
And has he learned? Does life really mean any more to him than it did
before? I wonder. As some one else has brilliantly said:
“The fierce, rudimentary mass mind of America, like that of some
inchoate, primeval monster, relentlessly concentrated in the appetite of
the moment, knows nothing as yet apparently of its own vast, inert,
almost nerveless body encrusted with parasites. One looks out to-day
over the immense vista of our society, stretching westward in a
succession of dreary steppes, and one realizes what it means to possess
no cultural initiative or tradition, filling in the interstices of
energy and maintaining a steady current of life over and above the ebb
and flow of individual necessity or animal appetite or purpose.” Money,
money, money. To build, build, build, in order to make more money, to
make a show, to be better than thou--financially only. It is told of the
quondam Russell Sage that he kept near him in his office a strongbox
containing $78,000,000 in what he called “gilt-edge” securities, the
which, whenever he wished to prove how wonderful he was and how great
his life had been, he brought forth and exclaimed: “There--there isn’t a
man in America who can show that many first-class stocks and bonds! Not
one!”
And there wasn’t, perhaps.
But what of it?
He died, and not knowing what to do with it (splendid testimony to the
American financial intellect), left it all to his wife; who, old and
ignorant herself and not knowing what to do with it, but fearing its
senseless distribution, left it, after various benefactions to sectarian
schools and much influence brought to bear, to the Russell Sage
Foundation. And the Russell Sage Foundation, not knowing exactly what to
do with it, has been “investigating,” and re-investigating and
re-re-investigating ever since, this, that and the other, with a view to
finding out what it should do with it, what one thing, if any, to help.
And what great thing, if any, has the Russell Sage Foundation done?
Well, America, in its own peculiar and interesting way, may find itself
intellectually. As an old char-woman who worked for me remarked, “I’m
not so dumb than I look.” So, possibly and probably, America.
To be sure, a new country must at first borrow its culture from
somewhere. One does not come by such a thing instanter and out of a silk
hat. Still here is a nation now three hundred years old; it has one
hundred and twenty millions of people, if not more; it has as great, and
in their way forceful, cities as exist anywhere on the globe; its
architecture is already most imposing and fast attaining a splendor
hitherto never equaled by any land; a far better and more satisfying
mechanical equipment is here than in any nation elsewhere. We have, in
so far as material facilities are concerned, more and better
opportunities for genuine culture than are now available to the mass
anywhere. Then, why are we so bent, I should like to know, upon more
money, and, when not that, upon idealistically misinterpreting life? The
few genuine thinkers that America has thus far produced are taboo: Poe,
Whitman, Twain. Only in one field, finance--not in war, politics, the
arts and sheer intellect--do our essential individuals compare favorably
with those of other lands. In the main we are too idealistic or
illusioned in all but our material affairs. But why all the delusion in
re the ordinary intellectual facts of life? No single nation has more of
wealth, courage, industry, or more impressive varieties of scenery, be
it of mountains, lakes, valleys, the coast. We should be, and for all I
know are (although the signs are not numerous), at the opening of an
era of art and letters such as the world in none of its great periods
has surpassed. Yet in spite of all this, and in so far as the mass and
its ostensible leaders are concerned, we are intellectually dull and
unperceiving in regard to all the basic facts of life. All men are still
honest, kind and true (or should be) in America; all women pure as
driven snow (or should be) in America. The Sermon on the Mount is our
real Constitution; the Ten Commandments our only laws. We all do justly,
think kindly, and it is only bad men from the world without, strangers
and evil-thinkers, who come from heaven knows where--for our
intellectual and spiritual cosmogony does not admit them--to cause us
trouble.
America in its own good time may come to a great end. And again it may
not. It may be--who knows?--a mere money machine, a honey-gatherer like
the bee, a material welter like Rome, without the slightest vision as to
what to do or how to act once it has its great store. Other and shrewder
nations, far less able financially or physically, may yet lead the giant
by the hand, pull him around by the nose. He may be psychologically the
same as the wealthy heir to whom life’s pains and doubts are and remain
unknown, who, being pulled in upon expensive pleasures or the ventures
of others and given a superficial reason, is cheerfully willing to pay
the bill and depart.
Well, if so be, so be. Who can help it? Nature, if not man, has a way
however, if not wisdom. In the course of time She disposes of nations
and their dreams, as well as man and his, by rotting them and their
material splendors back into primal chemical substances and forces and
forgetting them. Rome has gone; Greece has gone; and many, many another.
But speaking for a nation that wishes to stand forth mentally
significant among the peoples of the earth, that wishes to lead or at
least be among those that lead, must not thought--intelligent, artistic,
accurate vision--be among its primary characteristics? And is it not
possible that as with individuals so with nations--where the power to
think is lacking failure follows? Sometimes, and in view of the careers
of various nations past and still present, one is hounded by the thought
that as with individuals so with nations; some are born fools, live
fools, and die fools. And may not America perchance be one such?
One hopes not.
But--
THE DREAM
SCENE: _The vicinity of 115th Street and Broadway, New York City,
on a warm, lowery May night. Time, 11.15._
_Approach along Broadway from 116th Street George Paul Syphers,
Professor of Chemistry; Forbes Mitchell, Professor of Philosophy;
Abner Barrett, Professor of Physics. Syphers is medium in height,
slim, fiery, black-whiskered, barbered to perfection. He is
loquacious and demonstrative. Mitchell is attenuated, humped, gray.
He is quite old. Barrett is fifty, blonde, bald, heavy, silent._
SYPHERS
(_As they reach the corner._) Well, I turn off here. That was an
interesting discussion we had, eh? The fact is, Mitchell, as I told you
the other day, I have passed out of my old materialistic point of view
to a certain extent--not entirely--but now I see more order in things
than I once did--a necessary if mechanistic order. It seems more or less
inescapable to me, doesn’t it to you?
MITCHELL
(_Doubtfully_.) Well, yes, I might say--only--of course----
BARRETT
(_Dogmatically._) I do not see how any one can doubt law. Everything
obeys law of one kind and another.
SYPHERS
Quite so! Quite so! Law, of course. Everything obeys a law or laws of
one kind and another. Nevertheless, there are so many confusing
contradictions. Laws seem to conflict at times, don’t you think, even
in chemical and sidereal space. You don’t deny that, do you?
BARRETT
Still, more knowledge might prove them to be anything but contradictory.
SYPHERS
Well, I admit that, too. Only I was merely suggesting that I see more
definite order than I once did. A few years ago I could see nothing but
disorder, chaos, the inexplicable clashing of forces. Of late I am not
so sure. This matter of orthogenesis now; it appeals to me very much as
demonstrating an intellectual if not a spiritual order, some great
controlling force somewhere. I seem to see a definite tendency to order
in things. Life has certainly built itself up through the ages in a very
intelligent way indeed, don’t you think?
BARRETT
(_Loftily._) Ye-es, of course, only there have been many errors and
conflicts there too--sudden stoppage of plans in various directions.
MITCHELL
True, as I was about to point out.
SYPHERS
(_Almost unconscious of interruption._) I admit that. I admit that. What
I am getting at is this: all life, as we know it, is based on the
cell--cell origination, cell multiplication, cell arrangement. That is
an old story. Now here is something which is my own idea--it’s a mere
theory, of course--that the whole thing may have been originated,
somehow, somewhere else, worked out beforehand, as it were, in the brain
of something or somebody and is now being orthogenetically or chemically
directed from somewhere, being thrown on a screen, as it were, like a
moving-picture, and we mere dot pictures, mere cell-built-up pictures,
like the movies, only we are telegraphed or telautographed from
somewhere else, like those dot pictures that are now made electrically,
built up dot by dot, millions of them coming rapidly by wireless or wire
and being thrown on a screen of some kind--ether, the elements--you know
what I mean. You have seen the telautograph pictures I mean, of course?
BARRETT
Yes, of course. Very ingenious. Very ingenious. But how do you prove the
origination of the cell in the fashion that you want?
MITCHELL
(_Aside._) A rather slow movie, I should say, considering the length of
time it has taken to build it up.
SYPHERS
Well, in this way--it has its drawbacks, of course; you remember the
experiments of that Irish scientist Burke, don’t you? He generated what
he called a radiobe--a single cell in a plasm culture which he had
hermetically sealed and which he kept under the influence of radium. I
do not recall the exact facts of the case at the moment, and I do not
believe that his deductions have since been accepted, but that is
neither here nor there. That idea of his illustrates mine very well. If
we could prove that one cell, one radiobe, had been or could be
originated or generated by an outside influence of this kind--radium, if
you wish, in a plasm of that kind--we would have to admit that the whole
thing might be built up in some such fashion. Why, you could base a new
philosophy on that, Mitchell. One radiobe generated in a plasm culture
under radium or something else, some autogenetic force manifesting
itself through a thing like radium, and there you are. After that you
would have to grant the possibility of millions and billions of cells
coming in that fashion, whole nations constructed of cells, as they have
been.
MITCHELL
My dear Syphers!
BARRETT
There was some hitch in that experiment, however. The chain wasn’t quite
complete.
SYPHERS
I know--I know. I grant you that. All I’m insisting on is that if one
cell, one radiobe, say, can be generated by a synthesis of energy, why
not millions? And if millions, why not billions, the whole human family,
in short, since we are a synthesis of cells--this whole visible scene in
all its details? I know it sounds wild, but (_to Mitchell_) I have heard
you yourself say that you thought it might be possible that we were all
a part of some invisible psychic body, force body, in the mechanism of
which we function in some way, just as the cells do in ours.
MITCHELL
(_Much flattered._) Yes, I have said as much.
SYPHERS
Well, then, why may not my theory be true?
BARRETT
May? May? Of course it may. But how are you going to prove it? I myself
have suggested that Mitchell’s larger psychic body, as he calls it, may
be nothing more than a fetus, a secondary creature being built in the
womb of a still larger organism, but what of it? All of us, everything
that we see here, may be nothing more than parts of organs that are
being constructed in some huge womb. This so-called higher psychic body
may not even be complete yet, not ready to be born in its realm. But how
do we know? There’s nothing to prove it.
SYPHERS
Just the same, if I had a few hundred thousand dollars I would enlarge
my laboratory and pursue this subject. I believe that something may be
discovered. I believe that I could prove it in the course of time. Why,
snow crystals, tree and flower forms, everything, gives us a hint,
sometimes instantaneously. Why do snow crystals assume almost
instantaneously and out of nothing their beautiful forms? The
controlling impulse is certainly artistic, isn’t it, and outside of
anything we know? (_He notes that he is pressing the matter too far and
boring his two friends._) Well, good night. Glad to see you two at the
meeting to-night. It was interesting, wasn’t it?
BARRETT
Very. (_To himself._) He’s a terrible bore.
MITCHELL
Delightful. (_To himself._) I’m glad he’s done. (_They bow and depart._)
SYPHERS
Dolts! Fogies! That’s always the way, dull and cautious.
BARRETT
(_As they walk up the street._) An ingenious theory, but dangerously
speculative. He ought to read Stromeyer on “Impulse.”
MITCHELL
I often wonder about his work and just how sound he is.
(_SYPHERS reaches his own door and goes up the steps, unlocks it and
mounts the inside stairs to his room. He lights the gas in a chamber
which is half library and half bedroom._)
SYPHERS
(_Seating himself and gazing about dreamily._) A great idea. I’m sure of
it. Along this line is coming a scientific revolution. If I had enough
radium and stromium, why--but they cost so much. (_He yawns._) Life is
really a dream. We are all an emanation, a shadow, a moving picture cast
on a screen of ether. I’m sure of it. (_He gazes about, yawns again, and
begins to undress._)
A TELEGRAPH INSTRUMENT
(_At 110th Street Station._) Tick--tick-tick----
tick-tick-tick--tick-tick---- tick--tick-tick-tick-tick-tick----
TELEGRAPH OPERATOR
There goes that blamed machine again (_begins to write_.) “Professor
George Paul Syphers, 621 West 115th Street, New York City. Your uncle,
Edward Fillmore, died at eleven to-night. By the terms of his will you
are the sole heir to the bulk of his fortune, three hundred thousand
dollars. Come at once. A. J. Larywind, Counsellor,” (_Aside._) I wish
someone would leave me three thousand cents. (_To a waiting messenger._)
Here, Patsy. Take this up to 115th Street.
PATSY LAFERTY
(_Cock-eyed, overgrown, contentious._) Sure, it’s just de night to keep
busy. It’s goin’ to rain, an’ it’s me late watch. Oh, well, dere’s
nuttin’ like bein’ poor an’ honest. (_He seizes a black cotton umbrella
almost as large as himself and goes out._)
SYPHERS
(_Crawling into his bed._) The curious thing is: why should any dominant
force outside this seeming life wish to create it--the smallness, the
pettiness, the suffering? I must write a book about that. Here I
am--(_he suddenly bethinks him of opening a window and gets out. Looking
out_). It’s going to rain, I do believe. (_He returns and stretches
himself to rest._) There, it’s thundering already.
PATSY LAFERTY
(_Trudging solemnly up Broadway._) It’s funny, dese mokes wot git
messages at one in de mornin’. I’ll lay a even bet I don’t git nuttin’,
neider. If you’d come wit a million dollars after twelve o’clock dere’s
guys wot’d git sore.
SYPHERS
(_Dozing, but still continuing his speculations hazily._) I must
try to find the psychic impulse which originates and directs
the cell. That is the great thing. We’re all shadows, I say,
shadows--adumbrations--impalpable nothings--rumors--dreams. (_He turns
on his side._) If our ills become too great we might be able to wake up
or drive them away by thinking of this. It may be that that’s what we
do when we die--wake up. But that’s Christian Science, isn’t it? Bah!
(_He snores slightly._)
PATSY LAFERTY
(_Arriving at the door and closing his umbrella._) A fine night, dis.
An’ he won’t be in. Dat’s my luck. (_He rings the bell._)
SYPHERS
(_Beginning to dream._) Radiobes! Radiobes! Flying radiobes as big as
houses--monsters--(_He stirs. As he does so the ringing of the bell, the
rising wind and the thunder and lightning, which rapidly become violent,
identify themselves in some weird way with his thoughts. He is on a
large plain now over which a battle is being fought. The flashes of
lightning and bellows of thunder gradually identify themselves in his
mind with some impending disaster, vague and yet oppressive. He begins
to cerebrate in an imaginative, illogical way. A sense of something
ominous pervades him, a feeling of great change. Then the rat-a-tat-tat
of machine guns begins and armed figures running and fighting appear in
the distance._)
SYPHERS
(_Who once saw military service._) War! And fighting men! (_It begins to
rain._) That is a machine gun. Now I am in real danger. How did I come
here, anyhow? (_He moves a hand, thinking he is hurrying to cover._)
PATSY LAFERTY
(_Standing at the door, ringing the bell and shifting from one foot to
the other._) Wot a swell night! Wot a swell night! Now it’s startin’ to
pour an’ I’ll have to stand here aw’ile, I guess. Holy Cripes, dem drops
is as big as marbles! (_He pushes the bell again._)
THE PROFESSOR
(_Hearing the whirr of the buzzer in his dreams and taking it for the
rush of artillery and men._) Ah, the horror of war! What was I
thinking?--ah, yes! If one had some method of waking up. (_He mingles
the dream notions of his waking philosophy with the figures of his
dream._) Then there would be no more war, no horrors. It is entirely
possible, now that we know this existence of ours is a dream. I may be
dreaming now--who knows? If so, I could wake up and all my ills would
vanish--or would they? (_As the thunder and lightning increase._) How
horrible this is! (_The dream sky lights up as if with red fire._)
PATSY LAFERTY
T-r-r-r! T-r-r-r-r! T-r-r-r-r-r! Wot’s de matter wit dis bell? W’y don’t
de guy answer?
THE PROFESSOR
(_Dreaming and looking about him in apprehension._) War! War! How
terrible! How did I come here? How does there happen to be war? Those
are fighting men over there! They are killing each other! Horrors! But
the great thing is to escape. That fire is dreadful. It means death.
(_He struggles to put himself in motion and grunts in his sleep._)
PATSY LAFERTY
(_Ringing again._) Well, dis is some sleeper, all right. Or else dere
ain’t nobody home. I’ll kick, I will. (_He kicks._) Come to! I ain’t
supposed to stand here all night. (_Kicks and knocks are without
result._)
SYPHERS
(_Still dreaming heavily._) And here comes a file of soldiers--I hear
them tramping--a great company. Merciful heavens, they see me! (_He
begins to run. As he does so the file of dream soldiers begin to run
also._)
THE FILE OF DREAM SOLDIERS
Halt!
THE PROFESSOR
(_Breaking into a heavy sweat._) Great God! I haven’t a place to hide!
Oh, Lord, what shall I do? (_He turns, and in his dream he imagines a
deserted stone hut set in a grove of thick tall trees, which seems to
offer shelter. He runs towards the hut._) As I live, here is a stone hut
among thick trees! I’ll hide in it. Perhaps they won’t see me. _(He
dashes wildly in, slamming a heavy door behind him._)
A SCORE OF DREAM SOLDIERS
(_Hurrying after him and knocking with their musket butts on the door._)
Knock! Knock! Knock!
PATSY LAFERTY
(_At the door._) Knock! Knock! Knock! Gee, wot a night! Dese raindrops
look like spits. An’ dat lightning! Dat last one looked like a telegraph
pole standin’ straight in de air!
SYPHERS
(_Cowering in a corner._) Oh, Lord! My life is worth nothing! Here I lie
hiding in an empty stone hut, and those men at the door want my life.
What is life? A dream! A dream!--but, oh, such a precious dream! I would
not want to disappear--not yet! No, no! I would not want to wake up. I
don’t want to die--not yet. Not yet! (_As he lies there cowering, all
the coruscations and thunder of a great battle afflict him; cannon,
machine guns, human cries, commands. He cowers lower, and yet in spite
of the thickness of the walls which seem to protect him he can see
through them to the surrounding trees to where the dream soldiers await
him--tall men in red coats and towering shakos--and beyond them again to
the battlefield, red with flame and gore. As he stares, the men in the
shakos glare at him._)
FIRST DREAM SOLDIER
(_Pointing at him and speaking to another._) We’ll easily get him out
of there. Can’t you see him lying there, close by the wall? (_To the
other soldiers._) Bring a battering ram. (_A soldier starts off._) No,
bring a cannon. We’ll blow him out. (_A second soldier goes._) He thinks
we can’t get him, but we can. (_Other soldiers draw near. They move in
the curious, indefinite way common to figures in dreams. Nothing is
clear, and yet there is a sense of impending disaster. The Professor
studies the nature of his predicament with a sense of horror._)
THE PROFESSOR
(_Lying on the floor, close to the wall._) Ah, if I could only escape! I
was thinking a while ago that life was a shadow of something else, an
adumbration, a thing built up point by point like the dots of a
telautographed picture. Now if that were so I could get out of here. It
would be a dream. I could wake. I could cry “Avaunt!” I could stir and
it would all disappear and become as nothing. But here! Here--(_he
pauses and stares. A company of dream soldiers on horseback gallop up
and swing a cannon into position._)
THE CAPTAIN OF THE DREAM SOLDIERS
(_Dramatically._) Position! (_They unhook the horses and man the guns._)
Load! (_A shell is put in._) Fire! (_It belches flame and smoke. A great
hole is torn in the wall of the hut._)
PATSY LAFERTY
(_At the door._) Gee, dat las’ crack was a bold! If he kin sleep troo
dat he soitenly won’t hear me--or maybe he ain’t home. Well, I might as
well stand here. I can’t go back in dis. (_He decides to make himself
comfortable in the doorway._)
THE PROFESSOR
(_Imagining he is crying._) Help! Help! Oh, save me! Save me! (_He
realizes that he emits no sound, and groans._)
FIRST DREAM OFFICER
Once, more, men! Another shell here! (_Another is put in._) Fire!
THE CANNON
Poof! Boom! (_Another great hole is torn in the wall._)
PATSY LAFERTY
(_As a second electric crash occurs._) I don’t know wedder I’d better
stay here. I don’t wanna get killed. (_He walks about uneasily._)
THE PROFESSOR
(_Heavily and desperately._) I am lost! I know it. Oh, if my idea were
only true! What if all this turmoil and agony were a figment of the mind
merely, a cell or dot picture? Here I am in this hut; these soldiers are
about to destroy me. If I could just cry “Avaunt!” “Disappear!”--or if I
could know that I am not real, and disappear myself. I wonder if I might
not try it? (_He jumps to his feet._)
A FLASH OF LIGHTNING
Click--Sssssss!
A CLAP OF REAL THUNDER
Boom----!
THE PROFESSOR
(_To the dream soldiers, defiantly._) I defy you! Do your worst! You’re
not real! I’m not real! This whole thing is a dream! I’m a dream, or I’m
dreaming! I defy you!
FIRST DREAM SOLDIER
(_Drawing near with a rifle._) Is that so? You defy me, do you? I’ll
show you whether I’m real or not. (_He takes deliberate aim._)
SECOND DREAM SOLDIER
Yes, kill him. That’s the way!
THE PROFESSOR
(_Lifting his hand._) Wait a moment! Don’t! I--I’m not sure!
FIRST DREAM SOLDIER
But I will, just the same. You say I’m not real? I’ll show you whether I
am or not! (_He fires._) How does that feel?
THE PROFESSOR
(_Who has twisted himself about until he has one hand under him in a
most painful position._) Oh, God, I’m shot! And now I’ll die! This whole
scene, real or not real, will pass away and I will never know--or will
I? And yet once I was a man, and it was good to be alive. Oh! Oh! Oh!
(_He weeps and sinks down. A powerful clap of thunder half arouses him.
The knocking of Patsy Laferty becomes dimly audible, a cross between the
clatter of musketry and a knock. He stares at the soldiers, some of whom
seem already to be growing thin and wavering._) Dying! Alas! I’m dying!
Never will I see this wonderful world any more! (_He partially wakes._)
Or will I? What’s this--I’m not dying, after all! They’re not real! I’m
only dreaming. How astonishing! (_To the dream soldiers, defiantly._)
You’re not real, after all. You’re mere shadows, thin air. I’m dying,
but you’re not real. This house isn’t real. It couldn’t have holes in it
if it were, or at least I couldn’t have seen through it in the first
place if it hadn’t. You’re shadows, tissues of nothing, a mere fancy of
the brain. Oh, wonderful!
FIRST DREAM OFFICER
(_Standing by the cannon._) Are we? Well, you’re a fool! Wait! You may
be waking into another state, but you’ll be dead to this one. But we
won’t. Ha! Ha! We’ll still be here, alive. (_To the second dream
soldier._) He thinks he’s not real. He thinks we’re not real. He thinks
he’s not going to die, but wake up into something else! Ha! Ha! (_They
look at each other in a strange, fading, unreal way._) When he passes
out of this won’t he be dead to this, though?
THE PROFESSOR
(_Amazedly._) What is this? Am I dying, or waking up? Which is it? Are
there various worlds, one within another? Are those soldiers really
real? Great heavens! How strange! I am waking up, and yet this world in
which I am is real enough. I died there. I certainly did, or I am dying
there. (_The house begins to dissolve like smoke; the trees can be seen
through the bodies of the soldiers._)
PATSY LAFERTY
(_At the door._) I’ll give dis guy one more spin an’ den I’ll quit. I
ain’t gonna stand here all night, rain or no rain. Clump! Clump! Clump!
(_He kicks with his heel at the same time that he rings._)
THE PROFESSOR
(_Bounding out of bed._) Oh, blessed heaven! What is that? I’m not dead,
after all! I am really alive! It was a dream, all of it. How glad I am
to be awake! (_He reaches for his trousers._) But those soldiers! They
argued with me about it! They did! They made fun of me! Isn’t that
amazing! This dream is a call to me to seek out this mystery. If ever I
get money enough to do it that is certainly what I will do. I shall
devote all my life to solving this mystery. If only I could find
somebody who would endow a laboratory for this purpose. (_He pauses and
stares, as the bell whirrs._) Yes, yes! I’m coming! (_He bustles
downstairs, turning up the light as he goes._)
PATSY LAFERTY
(_Irritably, as the door is opened._) Syphers?
THE PROFESSOR
Yes.
PATSY LAFERTY
Tellygram. Sign here. (_He produces about a half inch of pencil and
holds up a signature blank. The Professor signs. Absentmindedly he tears
open the message, but while doing so turns and closes the door. Patsy
Laferty stares at it disconsolately._)
THE PROFESSOR
(_Reading._) A miracle! $300,000! Just what I need for that laboratory!
It’s a sign! The dream is a portent, a call! My poor dear, good uncle!
What moved him to leave me that? Now I know the dream was an omen. And
yet--(_thinking of a certain maiden he has been courting._)--should I
really do that? Three hundred thousand are three hundred thousand, and
where would I ever get that much again? (_He hesitates mentally._) We
could live beautifully on that. I’m not so sure. Perhaps I could get
some one else to furnish that money. (_He starts upstairs._) But that
poor boy! I forgot to give him a penny, and it’s storming. (_Returns and
reopens the door, looks up and down the street, and comes back._) Dear,
dear, dear! I should have given him a dime, anyhow--bringing such a
fortunate message. But I must think about this laboratory, though, and
this money. I must not act too hastily or inadvisedly. Three hundred
thousand are three hundred thousand, and---- (_He goes upstairs again
solemnly._)
PATSY LAFERTY
(_One block south, staring at the sidewalk._) Wot did I say? Wot did I
say? Dey never comes across wit nuttin’ after twelve--nuttin’. Not if
you handed dem a million.
THE AMERICAN FINANCIER
The long line of American financiers, beginning with Stephen Girard
(1750-1831), and extending via Astor, the Vanderbilts, Goulds, J. P.
Morgan and F. W. Woolworth to Henry Ford of the present time, suggests
nothing so much as a procession of thrifty and, in the main, cat-like
animals weaving a devious way amid intricacies of law and public opinion
and theories as to morals, duty, charity and the like, until finally one
is led to conclude that, by and large, the financial type is the
coldest, the most selfish, and the most useful of all living phenomena.
Plainly it is a highly specialized machine for the accomplishment of
some end which Nature has in view. Often humorless, shark-like, avid,
yet among the greatest constructive forces imaginable; absolutely
opposed to democracy in practice, yet as useful an implement for its
accomplishment as for autocracy; either ignorant or contemptuous of
ethical niceties as related to thine and mine, yet a stickler for all
that concerns mine; moral and immoral sexually--both types abound;
narrow to all but an infinitesimal line in nearly all that relates to
the humanities as applied to individuals; wise and generous in the
matter of large, even universal benefactions, yet guilty of the meanest
subterfuge where their own interests are concerned; and seeking always
to perpetuate their own fame. In other words, typical men and women of
an avid pagan world (vide Hetty Green, Russell Sage), yet surrounded by
religious and ethical abstrusities for which they care little and of
which they understand less.
Such might be called the pathology of the genus financier, not only in
America, but everywhere.
In regard to our American specimens it is more or less anachronistic to
speak of them as purely American in character, although, in a way, they
are. The organizing and financial type of mind--American, European or
any other--is really little different from that of all preceding
countries and ages. Yet financial manipulation, in the extended modern
sense, is comparatively new. It dates from the industrial revolution in
England in the eighteenth century. There was a time when the organizing
type of mind, comparable to our modern examples, was engaged in other
things: money-lending and exchange principally. The machinery for
finance in the modern sense was lacking. You might have found a J. P.
Morgan, a J. D. Rockefeller, or a Russell Sage as Keeper of the
Exchequer and Supervisor of the Grain Stores of, say, Egypt or Assyria,
or Adviser to the King, whether he ruled in Babylon, Persia or
elsewhere. One cannot help thinking what an excellent type of Keeper of
the Exchequer, Vizier or High Priest our own John D. Rockefeller would
have made. The robes! The sanctity!
As we come forward in history to the end of the Roman Empire and the
beginning of that mental darkness known as the Middle Ages, when all
intelligence, financial and other, seems to have been completely swept
away, we find the purely financial and organizing type but slowly
developing. Joseph (he of the coat of many colors), fabled Crœsus, who
ruled in Asia Minor, and Lepidus and Mæcenas, friends of triumvirs,
emperors and poets, are excellent examples of the ancient financial
type. Their like is not to be found until after the revival of banking
and trade in the fifteenth century. And if you look back you will see
that to-day, in another way, we have been repeating in Wall Street (or
were until a few years ago), the type of man who occasionally sat as
Emperor over all the Romans. If you are inclined to doubt this you
might, if the opportunity offered, examine the collection of portrait
busts of Roman Emperors of the highly executive and financial type
(Hadrian, Trajanus, Titus, Caracalla and the rest) in the Vatican, the
Musee del la Terme and the British Museum. Hadrian, for instance, was as
much like the late Commodore Vanderbilt, side whiskers and all, as one
man might be to another; and Trajanus greatly resembled the late Mark
Hanna, whose name somehow suggests that of a Roman. Any one of ten or
fifteen portrait busts of ancient Roman Emperors might almost be
mistaken for Armour, Morgan, Gould, Sage, Crocker, Stanford, Hearst. For
example, compare Russell Sage to Julius Cæsar; or Wm. H. Vanderbilt to
Augustus Cæsar. Indeed, if you were to examine some of the major
operations of the successful Roman Emperors you would find that their
power to maintain their positions with the Prætorian Guard and the
Patrician Class (which was really the Roman world, so far as they were
concerned) was largely financial and organizing in the same peculiar
spirit in which we find those qualities operating to-day.
It is not until the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in
Italy, Flanders and north Germany that one encounters financial types
very like those with which we have been very recently dealing. Italy of
the Renaissance found a most interesting specimen of this type of mind
in Cosimo I. of the Medici--“Pater Patriæ,” as he was called--who was
little more than a very active Vanderbilt I. of his day. The family
first conducted a successful pill business, then Cosimo engaged in the
banking business. Being a financier he secured control of nearly all the
financial channels of Italy, France, Greece, a portion of Egypt, and the
Lowlands. It is charged that he brought about the death of one or two
enemies in Florence, not because he disliked them, but because he
thought they were dangerous to his interests, and once he came very near
to being gibbeted himself. He was a patron of the arts, not so much
because he was emotionally and poetically enthusiastic about art as
because, as at present, it was a distinguished thing to be. The trick
of currying favor via art patronage is old. His descendants, having less
of his force and more of the refinement which invariably follows wealth,
did more for art and less for trade, and so while we see the Medici
family identified with the most brilliant period of Italian art we also
see it slowly sinking into financial and political insignificance. That
it finally degenerated and passed out is no reflection on the
significance of Cosimo, his primary import. Although the coldest and
most financial of them all, he was also the best.
This was equally true of Louis XIV of France and Frederick the Great of
Germany, organizing and financial types both, although monarchs by
birth.
England has had its full share of the type in the officers and directors
of its famous East India Company (Warren Hastings, for one) and their
efforts to monopolize and exploit the Indian Empire, as well as in the
very excellent Rothschild, who flourished at the time of the Battle of
Waterloo and who stood behind a tree to view the battle in order that he
might decide for himself which side was going to win and so get to
London and the stock-market first. There he spread the report that
England had lost so that the already trembling stocks of the nation
might tumble and he be able to buy them for a song. When he had gathered
in all the shares he could carry he gave out the correct news of the
victory and reaped his harvest. Dishonest? As you choose to look at such
things. But when has high finance been honest, or let us say,
considerate of the interests of others? The financial history of this
particular individual is so selfishly single-minded as to be almost
ridiculous, suggesting a power which invents man for one purpose and no
other, as generals, saints and the like are invented.
In America, the history of our financiers is so full of thievery and
selfishness as to appear comic were it not for the mass misery which so
many of their deeds involved. Stephen Girard, for instance, stole his
employers’ ship at the outbreak of the American Revolution (pretending
it had been sunk, of course), and with the proceeds opened a wine and
cider business in Philadelphia. John Jacob Astor drugged the Indians
with fire-water and bought their furs for a song, as well as bribed
Government agents to permit him so to do. J. P. Morgan senior at the
outbreak of the Civil War sold the Government five hundred of its own
condemned rifles for twenty-two dollars each, after having but the
moment before bought them _from_ the Government for three dollars and
fifty cents each, and that with money borrowed on the strength of the
proposed contract. (History of the Great American Fortunes, Myers, Vol.
II., page 172.) Cornelius Vanderbilt blackmailed the United States
Steamship Company, plying between New York and California, in the amount
of nearly $500,000 a year by threatening to operate a rival line. (Ibid.
Vol. II., pp. 120-121.) Jay Gould robbed the various States through
which his railroad ran and drove some of his rivals to suicide. Russell
Sage robbed the city of Troy of a railroad and bribed the Minnesota and
other State Legislatures. (Ibid. Vol II., pp. 12-16.) The record is too
long to be more than mentioned here; those interested should read Myers’
remarkable work, in which the crimes as well as genius of our long line
of money kings are described in full.
That the world has always been troubled with the huge financial
innovator and the self-seeker is of course a commonplace; the objection
to him has been, as a rule, that he has too few human traits. Like the
astronomer, the mathematician, the philosopher and the historian, his
thoughts are more or less remote from the concerns of the ordinary
individual, although his dealings are with him. To do anything which is
to be of benefit to the individual it requires the mind that sees the
individual en masse rather than in particular. Indeed, the thing that
has always confronted the individual of ability since the beginning,
aside from his own inner driving emotions, ambitions and needs, is this
same organized need of the mass as represented in constitutions,
governments, declarations, which in order to advantage himself he must
flatter, satisfy or exploit--but which he must meet in some way or fail.
And only when the organized sense of the mass becomes sufficiently
intelligent for it to act in concert is it possible to sweep away or
even curb the individual. For the individual and the mass are
interdependent facts, and the one cannot escape the other, try as each
may.
But never, apparently, previous to the French Revolution, which was a
revolt against centralized and hereditary constructive craft and
ingenuity, had it occurred to the world, or rather the mass, to rout
these individuals and make pariahs of them, although the world in recent
days has developed an especial aptitude for it, one must admit. England,
which is not so much a democracy as an ordered hierarchy of powers,
largely financial in character, has never felt called upon to drive
these gentlemen from their positions or quarrel with them for the often
singular and fantastic manner in which they have achieved their success,
or the indifference they may have displayed toward the millions below
them. The gentlemen at the top may or may not have intentionally done
anything for the peasants at the bottom in the past, but until very
recent days they have not been asked to relinquish their control of the
machinery. Yet now the world presents another angle to this proposition:
the organizer and financier is being suspected and harried everywhere.
Only in America, the home of anti-financial legislation, the
multi-millionaire is apparently becoming safer than ever and more
powerful. Yet to the economist, the historian, the student of politics,
it is already a truism that economic reforms are not and never have been
permanent; also that no one, however self-interested, ever succeeds
wholly in working for himself. He must do something for the mass if he
is to do anything for himself. It is a condition of life, not a theory.
The trouble in America, in so far as this type of mind is or was
concerned, is or was this: that when it appeared it came rather speedily
and roughly into contact with the pen-written notion or ideal embodied
in our American Declaration that all men are born free and equal, and
that they are possessed of certain inalienable rights, among which of
course are those of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And
these latter were not supposed to be interfered with by financiers or
organizers seeking power. Yet the race has always been, and will so
remain, of course, to the swift, the battle to the strong; chemical and
physical laws not being easily upset by fiats of government. Time and
chance still continue to operate as before, sometimes to destroy the
strong, sometimes to destroy the weak. The best that can be said for the
theories laid down in the American Declaration is that they do more
credit to the hearts of those who penned them than to their heads. Yet
that these sentiments so expressed should have moved to bring about a
conflict between the American individual and the American mass might
well have been foreseen, although curiously it has not yet done so.
Other countries without any Declaration are far more alive to their
inalienable (so-called) rights than is America, if one may judge by
recent developments in Russia and elsewhere. All good things may be and,
no doubt, are gifts, but they are not conferred by governments, any more
than death and disaster can be prevented by governments. Sometimes
innate strength and fortuitous circumstances help some of us, yet this
merely illustrates once more the truism that nature “plays favorites”
and that many are vastly better equipped than others.
A great voice, for instance, is a gift, and cannot be acquired at any
school or for any price; the beauty of a woman, however modest or
staggering, is a gift and cannot be purchased or even manufactured
(amazing as that may seem in the face of all the drug companies),
although ugliness, apparently, can almost be wished on a person, so
lavish is life with its disfavors. The ability to paint a great picture,
to design a great building, to lead an army, to organize a government,
to construct a philosophy, to dream a religion, is a gift and cannot be
added to any one by taking thought, however quickly it may be taken
away. Neither can the possessors of these be reduced to the level of
those who have nothing to offer, no ideas, no dreams. Christ said one
really significant thing, “Who by taking thought can add a cubit to his
stature?” If He had followed the logic of that statement He would never
have delivered the Sermon on the Mount or the Beatitudes and would not
now be so popular, but apparently He was genius enough to be illogical.
What has confronted the American organizing genius, now known as a
captain of industry, a multi-millionaire, a financier and the like, has
been--aside from a mass need for this, that and the other and his desire
to supply it in order that he might improve his own condition,
strengthen his own individuality, etc.--this same pen-written theory
about all men being free and equal. Free they might be to begin with,
one might hear him saying to himself--to a very limited extent,
anyhow--but equal to himself, however much they might be equal one to
another, never. It became his business, therefore, as he soon found and
as he afterwards phrased it, to “drive a horse and wagon through the
Constitution,” or indeed any other law that might be devised to stop him
and his dreams. I do not believe that any financial genius, American or
other, anywhere or at any time, ever stopped to consider that there was
such a thing as law or a Declaration of Independence or a Constitution
when he began; or, if he did, it was as something to be evaded or
overcome. To the aggressive organizing mind life is and always has been
a free and practically uncharted sea. It finds itself blazing with an
impulse to get some one new thing done; it conceives some great scheme,
is inspired with some great enthusiasm for something; and thereafter all
else is as nothing. Being strong and magnetic and enthusiastic, it
rushes in where it is generally assumed angels fear to tread and seizes
upon all which it deems may aid it in its dreams. The average man is of
as little significance to such a temperament as a stalk of grain to a
reaper. Any ideal other than its own is likely to be looked upon as an
impediment. But always, of course, there exists the tramping mass of
lesser individuals who have been going to school and church and there
learning (in America at least) all the religious and copy-book maxims,
which argue that the world was made for the individual and that he was
born free and equal, each as good as any other and each called upon to
aid the other; and these begrudge, and always have and always will,
these great giants their power. They often fight them and sometimes beat
them.
But they are not to be wholly undone by them at any time, anywhere. Like
the Lilliputians, the mass as often succeeds in binding Gulliver with
their threads as Gulliver succeeds in tearing through their petty stays.
The twain are ever being born side by side in nature; the giant and the
pygmy, the shark and the bluefish, the whale and the minnow. “Look,” cry
the minnows to their fellows, “this whale imagines he is better, wiser,
greater, than we! He moves in larger ways, disturbs our great sea,
taking his choice of the realms and pleasures of life. Why should this
be? Are we not as good as he? And yet he does all these things which we
cannot; he breaks the law which governs the average minnow, whereas we
cannot. Therefore he must be evil. We will seize and bind him and so end
his privileges, if not him.” Immediately and always, at this point,
there arises an intermediate figure or group, the sophisticated
“advocates of the people,” “tribunes of the people,” individuals less
powerful than the giants, though shrewder than the pygmies, their
employers, many of whom are sincere enough in their conviction of
unselfishness; others self-seekers and charlatans purely, yet each and
every one crying that he will deliver the mass from its bondage, and
actually attempting, or pretending, to adjust the impossible demands of
the people with the almost impossible individualism of the egoist. But,
honest or dishonest as they may be, the mass is never made quite free;
the financiers or individuals are never wholly curbed. Both merely
proceed to develop new issues and new battlefields.
Personally I believe that most of us would prefer that the mass should
not sweep away the individual, for each of us would prefer to be
somebody in however small a way rather than mere unrecognizable cogs in
a machine or bees in a bee-hive. At best, we are little more than that;
even our greatest individuals, individual as they may seem. They, too,
are but minute factors in the total machinery, little able to forefend
against disaster or the ultimate nothingness that swallows them. But one
thing is sure: the individual in the course of the development of his
dreams and ambitions does scheme out and construct or bring into organic
operation functions which are valuable to mass prosperity, and on that
score there is scarcely any fault to be found with him.
The thing that might seriously concern a thinking American would be
whether the American financial type, as contrasted with those of other
lands and times, is more or less admirable. Greece had Crœsus; Rome,
Lepidus, Hadrian; Italy, Lorenzo, the money-gathering Popes; France,
Louis XIV, the Baron de Hirsch; England, the first Rothschild, the late
Cecil Rhodes, Harmsworth, Strathcona; Japan, Shibusawa.
While it may be admitted that the organizing types developed in America
have not had any too great charm or virtue (Astor I., Vanderbilt I.,
Gould, Sage, Harriman, Morgan), still they appear to compare favorably
with most ancients and moderns. If they have done less for the arts, as
many seem to think, socially, or at least economically, they have done
as much if not more than their predecessors. Astor I. may have begrudged
a washerwoman fifty cents, dunned his tenants for rent, debauched the
Indians, but he opened up the most remote portions of America and laid
the way for roads and railroads. The first Vanderbilt was no doubt a
brutal, cruel and savage man, but he had the vision which made a
transcontinental railroad possible. His greed and vanity made it
possible. As much might be said for Gould, Russell Sage and Harriman,
though the picture of Sage keeping apples in his desk to avoid buying
lunches for his friends or well-wishers and using his old plug hats for
umbrella stands in order to get a little more wear out of them could not
be of much interest to the mass except in a Dickensian sense. Unless one
accepts the subtleties of Nature as one finds them, sees in all an
inexplicable and yet biologic or universally constructive plan, and in
these riant and lawless individuals a scheme of hers to achieve
something quickly, there is nothing very admirable or even explicable
about the dark goings to and fro of such types as the late J. P. Morgan,
H. H. Rogers, Thomas F. Ryan, William C. Whitney, or any of a score of
other large fortune-builders so recently in control of stupendous
matters here and elsewhere. They are not explicable save as motivating
forces in the hands or will of higher powers--good, bad or indifferent.
Seen at close range they are more suggestive of sharks and we of
sniveling bluefish, and it is plainly to our best interests either to
keep out of their way or unite firmly to oppose them in whatever way we
can, unless we choose to be promptly eaten.
Yet are they any worse than their prototypes anywhere? The worst that
can be said for the American is that as yet no one of him has been able
to rival Lorenzo the Magnificent or Louis XIV to gather and use in any
marked way, supposing there has been anything of importance to use, the
significant artistic personalities and materials (American or general)
of his time after the fashion, say, of a Lorenzo, a Hadrian or a Can
Grande. Perhaps he has had few opportunities, no Michelangelos to
countenance or foster, no Raphaels or Leonardos to attach to his court
or entourage. Again it may be urged that he has never been in any
position to organize or dictate, being by no means in any free or
superior position in a democracy such as this. The best he has been able
to do apparently is to buy, although of course the power to patronize
nobly and generously has to a certain extent been within his range.
Still, a stranger to our rich and powerful land might (I do not say he
would) be struck by the abject poverty of a Poe or a Whitman, scarcely
knowing which way to turn for means, as contrasted with the enormous
affluence of so many financial geniuses. Why, one such might ask, should
either a writer or poet of the transcendent merit of either of these
have lacked a financial sponsor? And why, the same inquiring mind might
ask, was there no Mæcenas to befriend the late George Inness, Harris
Merton Lyon, or MacDowell, the musician? But in other ways--via
libraries, gifts to art museums, schools and universities--he would have
to admit that the American multi-millionaire has done quite as well as
the others; only, in so far as I can see, he has in the main lacked the
insight to connect his gifts with an impulse toward the truest art
values and realms of mental freedom and refinement. Too often, as in the
case of our universities, his gifts have been far too subtly identified,
aside from purely technical progress, with mental retrogression, or at
least the perpetuation of religious and moralistic dogma not compatible
with the truest mental development. At the same time the retort might be
that it has never been a part of the organizing ability of any money
genius anywhere to plan for true mental progress. It may not be
necessary. Life may be taking care of that “on its own,” as the phrase
runs.
However that may be, one cannot help thinking how interesting it would
have been if in New York or elsewhere any one of the above-mentioned men
had in his day troubled to gather about him in some private court a
representative group of intellectual and artistic personalities, for the
sole purpose of testifying to his interest in that side of life, if
nothing more. After all, the living individual is worth something, and
any one of our financiers might have done what no American of wealth, as
far as I know, has as yet done: invested some of his boundless wealth in
personality. Or he might have endowed a wholly independent magazine or
newspaper or theatre, of which there is at present not one, or a school
of special learning free from dogmatic interference, or a publishing
house, or a university which should have been a true university and not
one devoted to the economic or social or religious theories or moods of
any particular period. The strangest lack or flaw in the American
organizing financial temperament, in so far as I can see, is or has
been, hitherto, its inability to see either character or significance in
anything save movements which tend to further the most material
financial aims: railroads, butcher-companies, electricity, gas,
typewriter and other purely mechanical or material organizations. Yet
possibly, up to the present time, the land has only needed things of
this kind. And perhaps the next generation will make amends. Who knows?
Thus far there has been little if any tendency to invest in anything
save such art or art forms as have been heralded by time.
To this day, ancient Asiatic, Egyptian and European art forms continue
to pour in on us in a brilliant phantasmagoric stream, until we
threaten, or did, to drain the world of its treasures. Our private
mansions groan with the antiquated skill of Asia and other continents,
but of these other matters, or the cultivation or preservation of a
single living personality, not a word. It is possible to go forth and
raise any reasonable or even unreasonable sum for any number of useless
or surplus charitable organizations or hospitals or churches, whereas if
it were a question of cash for a truly civilizing movement of some kind,
or a personality, the obstacles would prove well nigh insurmountable.
Some of the trashiest homes I have ever had the misery of beholding have
been those of men of tremendous wealth and alleged refinement, stuffed
to overflowing with bogus furniture and art. Yet, when all is said and
done, are they to blame? Are they not specialized machines sent here for
a purpose? And should one expect more? Verily we have our reward in
their practical achievements.... Yet, also, when one looks at them one
cannot help remembering that Walt Whitman lived in a back street in
Camden and depended upon a friendly admirer to bring him a fish for his
supper; that Poe lived in a hut in the woods, unable to achieve or
afford a more suitable abode. I am not quarreling; I cite these as
interesting facts.
* * * * *
An interviewer once questioning me in regard to the significance of the
American financial type (it was just after I had published “The
Financier”), raised the question as to whether the American financial
type, then so abundant and powerful, had ethically the right to be as it
was or do as it was doing, seeing that it was being and doing about as
it pleased. My answer was, and I still see no reason for changing it,
that, in spite of all the so-called laws and prophets, there is
apparently in Nature no such thing as the right to do or the right not
to do, if you reach the place where the significance of the social chain
in which you find yourself is not satisfactory. The murderer has under
the written law no right to murder anybody. It is perfectly plain that
he has the right if he is willing to pay the penalty, or if he can evade
it. Conscience, this thing called conscience to which people repeatedly
appeal, is, as I have pointed out elsewhere, little more than a
built-up net of social acceptances and agreements in regard to society
or the agreed state of facts in which we all find ourselves when we
arrive here; in other words all the things which we wish to do and be,
or avoid. It is not anything save an inherent condition of balance in
Nature which desires and achieves a very rough equation, but nothing
which works exact justice to any individual anywhere. The so-called
“still, small voice,” ever present at one’s inner or spiritual ear, is,
if it is anything at all, a sense of self-preservation and conditional
desire for equation or peace--stillness, rest, lack of friction.
It is true that the individual may not always agree with the ethics of
his time, or that he may smack of anything but sweetness and light, may
even seem a little gross or terrible; but if he prove essential, as he
nearly always does, his revolt against the commonplace fixity, rigidity
and the like of the slower-moving man cannot be looked upon as either
wholly evil or in vain. Indeed, if he did no more than throw a new light
on this strange phantasmagory called existence, then, ethics or no
ethics, he would have been worth while and it would make no essential
difference whether he agreed with passing theories or not. Apparently
the world, or let us say the race, is moving along in some curious way
to possibly a larger, more widespread condition of complexity and
articulation, part with part (variety in unity, unity in variety), and a
self-sensating intellectual perception and appreciation of the same. Who
knows? But beyond that, what? Is man better, purer, more spiritual, more
generous than ever he was? Do any of the savages or animals lack any of
the emotional or charitable traits which we possess? Observe the wolf
with its young; the cat; the dog; the lion. Are not all swayed by
conditioning laws of subsistence and which they obey, but nothing more?
True, they kill to eat, to preserve themselves. Has man ever done
less--or more?
Any naturalistic philosopher can, of course, trace all the steps for
you, how it is that you have come to be seemingly so different, although
he cannot tell you why or where you are going. My own guess would be
that we, or rather the race, is going on to a greater individuality,
plus a greater weakness as to its component and clinging atoms,
providing it does not suffer an endless dark age of mass control or
total extinction in some form or other. Nietzsche appeared preaching
individuality, greater individuality for everybody who could achieve it,
and to a certain extent he was right. Greater individuality than the
world has yet seen will certainly be achieved by some. Schopenhauer,
before him, announced that only failure for the individual was possible,
and to a certain extent he was right also. The two saw the oversoul from
different angles. Again, Marx, the humanitarian, appeared preaching
solidarity for the mass and mass control, and his work will probably
result in greater material battles between the individual and the mass
than any yet witnessed. If one stands with the individualists, as one
may well do, and believes that there are no laws created by mass
conditions and necessities which the individual should not be allowed to
break for the subsequent good of the mass, and also that the mass only
moves forward because of the services of the exceptional individual,
then one will be compelled to agree with Nietzsche that it is folly not
to wish that the significant individual will always appear and will
always do what his instincts tell him to do. On the other hand if one
feels, as so many of the less well-equipped do, that in the long run and
in the plan of Nature itself the individual is nothing, the type all,
and that mass conditions favoring the production of many of the best
type are most important, then the airs and dreams of the individual in
regard to his personal satisfaction and satiation will not seem so
important, the general welfare of each individual of the mass more
important than anything else. And this will mean that always the
special individual, the genius of any kind, will be curbed and
restrained if not actually pushed into the background. And, in the main,
life proves this nearly all the time. Attempts at world domination on
the part of one individual and another have proved failures, as witness
Darius, Alexander, Hannibal, Napoleon, the Kaiser.
Yet theories and doxies wear thin with the course of time, and the
“still, small voice” of one age is not the “still, small voice” of the
next, strange as it may seem. At best, all we have is the individual,
not always financial, by any means, or artistic, but one who has dreamed
out something: music, a picture, poetry, a machine, a railroad, an
empire--anything, in short, that man as race or nation can use or
rejoice in. If to have a Woolworth Building, a transcontinental
railroad, a Panama Canal, a flying machine, to say nothing of literature
and art, means that we must endure a man who is dull, greedy, vain,
ridiculous in many ways or even an advocate of every conceivable vice in
order to twist his brain into some strange phantasmagorical tendency,
the result of which will be some one of these things, there are many who
would enthusiastically say, “Then let us have him along with all his
lacks or vices, in order that this other may be.” If it is a question of
having a Villon or not, provided we cannot have him without having a
thief at the same time, then the same or another group would cry, “Let
us have the thief and the poem concerning the ‘Snows of Yesterday.’” For
my part I am convinced that so-called vice and crime and destruction and
so-called evil are as fully a part of the universal creative process as
are all the so-called virtues, and do as much good--providing, as they
do, for one thing, the religionist and the moralist with their reasons
for existing. At best, ethics and religion are but one face of a shield
which is essentially irreligious and unethical as to its other face, or
the first would not exist.
For myself, then, I cannot say that personally or socially the American
or any other financier, as I have investigated him, is not as
satisfactory as may be, all things considered. Artistically thus far he
is not much to survey, but a giant or a Titan he certainly has been. As
for the majority of them, they were by no means presentable or even
acceptable socially, but what would you? They were, in the main, too
ignorant, too insistent on their own views, too self-hypnotized by their
own dreams of self-advancement and dominance. A leader of polite society
anywhere, for instance, might not be willing to welcome a Russell Sage,
a Jay Gould, or a John W. Gates or his wife, or indeed any other
American financial type thus far known, and this solely on the ground of
expediency or social or artistic fitness or unfitness for the lighter
forms of living, but that in itself proves nothing. It could truthfully
be said, on the other hand, that it would scarcely be possible to admit
the average society man to the threatening precincts of radical energy
or thought in any form. One thing is sure: the individual cannot wholly
understand the mass, nor the mass the individual. Both have their
significance, their place, but if one were to say of either that it or
he alone had claim to significance as a helpful factor in life, or as
dramatic or artistic material, or as a spectacle, one would be greatly
mistaken. Both have. All have.
THE TOIL OF THE LABORER
A TRILOGY
I.
“The ears to hear! The beauty
Of life is unceasingly calling.
The eyes to see! Its glory
Is ever unfolding anew!”
The toil of the laborer is artless. There is in it neither form, nor
color, nor tone. For months I have been working as only workingmen work,
and in the dreary round of the hours it has come to me that the thing
which is wearisome and disheartening about it is that it is utterly
devoid of art. In the construction of a building, for instance, whereat
we labored for three long months, I discovered that with each day’s
labor I was in contact only with that which was formless and colorless
and toneless. Huge, misshapen, disheartening piles of brick;
commonplace, indifferent and colorless masses of stone, wood, iron,
sand, cement; bone and sinew of what was to be, but in themselves devoid
of all that could appeal to the eye or touch the heart, and scattered
about in such an aimless way as to bring to the mind nothing but a
wearying sense of disorder. This disorder, however, as soon became clear
to me, was not apparent in a definite way to all those who worked amidst
it. These mixers of mortar and carriers of brick toiled in the grime and
dust without seeming to realize that it was a wretched condition, hard,
grim and, so far as the sum of their individual lives was concerned, but
meagerly profitable. Carpenters, masons and iron-workers went sturdily
about their labors, but the artless and unlovely nature of their work
was over it all, and despite their seeming unconsciousness to it one
felt the drag of its absence, their eagerness to get away, their innate
yearning to be where things were not in the making, the urge to be out
in the larger and more perfect world where form and color and tone do
abound.
For, after all, in the main, things do stand complete, as we see them.
The hills have their enduring roundness, the trees their perpetual
forms. Landscapes and skylines are not torn and scraped as in the
vicinity of some (comparatively) minute constructive labor. Nature is
nearly always cunningly pleasing to the eye on the surface, whatever may
go on below, whereas the average constructive processes are so often
discordant, broken, disordered.
Seeing this, and not being able in my own consciousness to explain why,
my heart was sad and I wondered why life should be thus grimly
organized; why formlessness in the parts of the thing to be formed; why
tonelessness in that which when laboriously organized would be all tone;
why colorlessness in that which in the end would enliven the heart with
color and dance before the eye a perfect thing.
In the progress of the work, however, it was given me to see that, in
the production of all things here, there is at bottom this very
formlessness innate. For to organize and perfect one thing we must take
from and destroy another; and in doing that we fly in the face of that
which we most desire: order and harmony. Therefore, if we would have
that which the inexplicable urge for something new and more beautiful
commands, we must apparently steel our hearts against the old and
destroy it, although, having committed the offense of destruction, we
must repay or balance by the labor of construction.
It is not given to all of us to follow the ramifications of Nature’s
planning nor to see wherein justice or the seeming injustice lies. Most
of those about me--average short-reasoning creatures--took their labor
drearily enough and were not able to see in any definite inspiriting way
the approaching beauty of that which their hands were building. It did
not concern them. Many of them came and labored but a little while,
doing but a minute portion of that which was to be the whole, seeing
only the mass and chaos of it without ever obtaining one glimpse of the
loveliness which was to be.
But when the labor had been completed, when the mortar had been mixed
and the brick and stone removed from their uneven masses and set in
order, when the wounds of the earth had been smoothed over, the
scattered débris removed and the grass allowed to grow, when in the
light of the restful evening there rose, in this instance, high in the
air a perfect tower, buttressed, arched and pinnacled, with here a
window reflecting the golden Western glow and there a pillar standing
out in delicate relief against the perfect background of the sky, the
meaning of the chaos came home. Here it was: color, form, tone, beauty.
The labor of the excavator, the toil of the iron-worker, the irritating
beats of the carpenters’ hammers, the mess and disorder of the field of
action, had all blended together finally and made this perfect
thing--only they were no longer a part of it. To most of them it was all
but meaningless. Having labored on but portions of it they could
scarcely conceive it as a whole.
And yet as I looked my heart rose up, and I, for one, was thankful to
have been in part a worker, to have worked a little, to have wearied a
little, to have sighed a little, that so lovely a thing might be.
II.
The toil of the laborer is thoughtless. There is in it neither
conception nor initiative nor the development of that which is new.
Though the hands labor and the body bend, the heart is not in it. It is
all a weariness and a travail of the flesh, and the profit is unseen.
In a certain factory, not far from the heart of the city of New York, I
worked as a laborer. My duty was to carry shavings and lumber and to
sweep the floor. All day, from the blowing of the whistle at seven in
the morning to its welcome blast at six at night, my body was busy
bending and lifting in the effort to keep the floor clean of shavings
and supplying a half-dozen machines with lumber. The slow, unchanging,
imperative nature of the work, the fact that I went on whether one man
came or another one stayed away, the dreary persistence with which it
was necessary to repeat the same motion day after day, week after week,
month after month, year after year, was, to the thinking and restless
mind, maddening.
In this factory at the time there ruled a foreman well fitted to the
scheme of things. He was a strange, egotistic, vainglorious soul, with a
mind so set up by the fact that he had been foreman of this little shop
that there was no living with him. He was arbitrary; his word was law.
With an air that might have become a tragedian, he walked about his
domain and glared upon each and all, meditating upon his exalted
position. Every word was either a command or a reproof, and in times of
excitement or depression, such as naturally flow from the hurry or the
lack of work, he was always about, venting his humor or wrath, as his
mood dictated.
This situation, coupled with the meager wages, the enormous wealth of
the corporation which controlled it all, the utter indifference of those
who sat at the top to those who worked at the bottom, was a difficult
thing to endure. It was so very apparent to any one who thought that the
work of those at the bottom was entirely without point save as a means
of subsistence. To lift and carry, to move along given lines and within
certain limits--this was the sum and substance of wisdom required, and
it mattered little who did it. Some small personal characteristics
figured in, such as whether a man was naturally quick or slow,
good-humored or ill-humored and the like, but the main point was to do
the work as conceived, planned, initiated and developed by some one
above. And this could be acquired until it was not a matter of thought
but of rote. What you thought or how you felt was not involved.
One of its pathetic aspects was that it was involved with the
maintenance of a condition which was not necessarily beneficial or
worthy of approval. So many of the owners, for whom these thousands upon
thousands of individuals labored, were mere idlers in society, social
loafers, daily bulletined as the chief factors in a dozen trivial
amusements, and as wholly unconscious of this under-condition which made
for their situation and pleasure as if it did not exist at all. For
every motion and bending here, some one else was deriving the privilege
not to move or bend there. It was as if some untoward power were
momentarily taking something from each of these and giving it to some
one who did not even know whence it came.
And the saddest part of it was that these toilers, born for the most
part to a condition and with brains unsuited to anything much better,
were still not so dull that they could not see, and that rather plainly,
how scurvily Nature was using them, with what a vast, contemptuous
indifference. It was little to Her whether they lived or died, did
poorly or well. Most of them were mere machines who had acquired the
little they knew by observing others, who, if they were capable of
thinking at all, were restricted by the nature of their labor in
utilizing thought, and yet they could see so plainly that those above
them did very little or nothing, and received much, so much more. It
was one of those situations in which labor, a mere round of motions,
took the place of thought and left them weary and disinterested at the
close of the day, not fit to originate a thought if it had been possible
or necessary.
And yet, after a time, it occurred to me that it was not, perhaps, so
much the thoughtlessness of it that was so wretched as that any human
being, toiling to his full capacity, should not receive more of the
legitimate profits of his labor. These men, ignorant and, in a way,
valueless without direction, were nevertheless useful creatures and, in
this sense if no other, were deserving of a far more reasonable share of
the profit which their efforts created. That it should not be so, that
despite their willing or non-willing they should be driven early and
late to create a surplus which was not directly applied to the pressing
needs of society as a whole, but to the frittering amusements of the
few, not much better in the main than themselves, seemed hard.
And yet sometimes when I looked out upon the world as it glimmered
before my windows--when I saw, as it so chanced, the waters of the river
flowing by, the splendid boats riding at anchor or steaming peacefully
past, and the wonder of the hills and hollows, all set suggestively
before the eyes--it came to me that, perhaps, in spite of the seeming
injustice involved in this situation, variety was as essential to
happiness as so-called justice or equation, and that the very
inequalities I was bemoaning were the things which I was admiring in
Nature. To blot out the light and the shadows, to remove the hills and
dales, to take away the far reaches which spread between luxury and
want, idleness and toil--might not these be the things which after all
would rob life of much of its value and charm? Might they not?
But as I turned again to the weariness of my labor and saw once more the
routine, the comparative slavery, the drag of almost endless hours, I
could not help wishing for each that there might be some better
solution than this necessity for variety--that perhaps the heights and
hollows need not after all be so vast. To survey a mountain, to view a
desert--was not this the privilege of but a few? And might not the true
beauty of life exist in the way-places where are neither heights nor
depths but only a tender and appealing undulation? I wondered, and still
do, for in spite of endless personal inconvenience I have never been
able to believe that an unbreakable dead level of equality should
maintain, that none should suffer overmuch, that none should want to the
extreme. And yet at this time, in this place, the less varied seemed the
all-to-be-desired. That it was not to be found in so starkly diversified
a world as here offers did not lessen the pain of the labor or the value
of the ideal in the least. To work, to wait, to hope, to pray for some
such change--how important these loomed in the hour of weariness! And
yet the charm that hope cast over effort was as though the difference
had already in part been bridged and that the realization of the ideal
was almost at hand.
III.
The toil of the laborer is without mercy, its grim insistence unrequited
by anything save the meager wages wherewith it is paid. There is no true
beauty in it, no tenderness. There is no thought of anything save what
muscle and the strength of the individual can be made to yield. More
than this, the sum of what is accomplished passes almost entirely into
other hands. There is no provision made for those who will be as
tattered remnants when the things for which they labored have been
accomplished.
For several months I worked with the laborers for a great railroad. It
was the kind of labor that falls to the lot of every man who is
unskilled and whose sense of honesty or compulsion or duty or need
commands that he labor. Those with whom I worked were employed to carry
lumber, load brick, shovel earth and mix mortar. The work was requited
at the rate of fifteen cents an hour, and nothing more than this was
allowed for overtime. We worked nine or ten hours a day, as the light
permitted. There was no rest for those here employed save in a form of
subterfuge, which was as wearisome as the toil itself to one not
accustomed to it by long years of practice. To be sure one might delay
in the carrying of anything; it was possible to be deliberate, to hang
first on one foot and then the other; there was a way of resting on
one’s pick before lifting it; but the gain was scarcely worth the pains.
At the close of the day the sum of idleness thus secured would not be
sufficient to produce a restful feeling, and the knowledge that a
watchful foreman was well aware of the spirit of your labor was not
conducive to comfort.
We were under a foreman whose conception of life was that it meant toil,
and who himself was perfectly equipped physically to meet it. He did not
stop to parley or temper the necessities with tenderness but shouted and
cursed his commands, the fulfilling of which was as much of a burden on
his mind as upon our bodies. Work there was in plenty, vast quantities
of labor extending into the weeks and years, and the only thought which
the conclusion of one hard day’s toil could bring was that there was
another exactly like it tomorrow. It had no end for the individual save
in arbitrary cessation on his part, the ending of his pay, or in
disintegration and death. And need drove so many to continue day after
day, without rhyme or reason in so far as the individual was concerned.
I could not help pondering over this from time to time, wondering at the
lust of the controlling powers at the top for money and place, the
fierceness of Nature in placing such an impulse in them, the fierceness
of the temper of our immediate masters (general managers,
superintendents, foremen and the like), the persistence of their
frowns, the manner in which, when anything was delayed or the work went
wrong, they visited the blame upon the heads of those beneath them, the
urge and blame finally falling with sharp effect upon the carriers and
serfs at the bottom. Life did not seem to require or justify it, I often
thought. The rewards achieved by those at the bottom at least were too
inconsiderable. The enormous and almost useless surplus of this great
corporation flowering out into exotic social forms at the top was proof
that it was an unjust exaction. A man should be a man in spite of the
orders of his superiors. Mercy and tenderness should qualify our every
deed.... So it looked from the bottom.
And then one day I was made a foreman.
I was determined that I, as foreman, would hold persistently, through
whatever wearinesses might come, to this earlier creed of courtesy and
consideration. I told myself that I would do better than these others.
There should be no harshness in my tone. I would not swear. A moderate
effort would be demanded of my men, but nothing more. So much for good
intentions.
In this new capacity I found that my duties were of a different nature
from those of my former. Here, instead of running at the beck and call
of another, I had men running for me. I had from a dozen to fifteen men
under me, as the work varied, and my principal duty was to see that they
did not shirk.
I accepted this with a light heart. It seemed easy enough, something
which could be accomplished in the most gracious spirit. All I had to do
was to take my position beside my gang, humming a tune, and to watch (as
I thought) their progress with a gentle and merry heart.
How speedy and how sad was my disillusionment!
Before one day was gone I was made to feel that the pressure which was
on me from above must be transferred to those who were below,
regardless. There were orders to be complied with, periods to be
observed, standards of quality to be maintained in certain kinds of
work, which my men did not always understand. Nor did an explanation or
a simple request always result in understanding or ready willingness to
comply. They were often tired, a night’s rest not always apparently
repairing the weariness of the day before. None were so dull that they
could not see that many reaped where they had not sown, took joy in that
for which they had never paid, while others like themselves sweated
under a load which they had never willed to carry. Dark looks, dark
moods, dark wishes were as common as ever, yet if my own position or my
superior’s good will were worth anything to me I could not allow them to
fall below their quota of toil. It was necessary to achieve a given
result, or resign, and at every turn there were rules, rules, rules.
How hard I tried to adjust my new relationship to the ideal which had
previously been mine, and at the same time comply with the rules of the
company, I will not say. For a time I did manage to keep a cheerful
attitude and to speak gently. I tried to overlook the indifference and
subterfuge which I knew they were practicing and which before, in part
at least, had seemed justifiable but which must also in part be
overcome, if life were to go on at all. For Nature, as I had come to
see, had established these inequalities, the smallness of mind in some,
the strength and vision in others. Who was I to set about establishing
exact justice or equation, where I had not created? Or how or where? Or
I might smile and smile and urge with pleasant compliments, but how did
that justify or make amends? And although for a time it seemed as though
I might succeed in avoiding all difficulty, still the memory of my own
recent feelings was too fresh not to influence me deeply.
Then came a day when the pressure of work to be done was so much
greater than it had been before that the usual subterfuge of the men
became an irritation to me. They were painfully and exasperatingly slow,
if not without reason, and the pressure on me from above was heavy also.
A heavy rain had washed the earth into a long trench which we had been
excavating. It was necessary to hurry the reopening of this in order not
to delay other work. Concrete had to be prepared, a large foundation set
by a given date. We were under urgent surveillance from our superiors
and could but follow out their orders or resign.
In this situation I confess that I did not do much parleying with my
sense of equation or justice. Although I knew these men to be in the
main underpaid and overworked, and in so far as the corporation was
concerned mere machines to be pushed to the limit of their capacity and
discharged when no longer useful, still I stood beside them and ordered
and commanded, urging first one and then the other with shouts and gruff
words, until at last they were as wrought up and as harried by me as
they had been by any one of whom I had previously complained. They were
driven, harassed _by me_, until one, irritated by the anachronism of it
all, no doubt, my previous enthusiasm for better conditions, turned on
me with: “Yes--hurry! Hurry! You didn’t work so hard yourself, though!”
I paused in my ordering and walked aside a little space to consider. How
true was the thing he said! I had not worked so. It had been a constant
complaint with me, in my own mind at least, that so much insistence and
heartless driving had never been justified by the reward offered, that
the men were entitled to more than they received for the grudging toil
they gave. And here was I outdoing these drivers who to me had seemed
most brutal!
For that day then, and for many others, I tried to discover just how it
was that I had drifted into so rough and exacting an attitude. Did I
not know now, as well as before, that the corporation for which we were
all working was enormously rich? Had I not more evidence than before
that the men were overworked and underpaid, my own demands proving it?
Could I not see in the orders given me that there was no consideration
for them, but only the thing to be accomplished at the least possible
expense?
I acknowledged freely that this was absolutely true, and yet I now
pleaded with myself that I saw no way to remedy it and that if I did not
fulfill the company’s orders some one else would. The work had to be
done. There was no way of permitting these men to shirk and take their
time, without noticeably delaying the work. If the corporation was to be
run, its present efficiency maintained and the public served, it would
of course have to be done at a profit which would induce men of
initiative and skill at the top to serve; otherwise no man would
undertake the matter, and there would be no labor at all for any of
these men at the bottom. For Nature apparently went on the theory of
great reward for those who could or would originate and conduct in a
large way, little for those who could not; and these at the bottom did
not and apparently could not originate. Their reasoning powers were not
as yet sufficiently developed for that. They were, by reason of their
mental equipment, hewers of wood and drawers of water.
After a time I felt that I could no longer go on without making a
definite choice: I must serve them or their masters wholeheartedly. The
retort of the laborer had proved too great a shock, and it was long
before I recovered my exterior equanimity, and never again my internal
peace, here. Plainly I was not one called by nature to this task. Reason
as I would, the two elements of capital and labor, exacting strength and
helpless weakness, would not adjust themselves within my consciousness
save in some such rough way as I here saw operating, and so because of
my natural sympathy for these underlings I was forced in spite of myself
to choose sides. Either I must relinquish my former attitude of sympathy
for the men and opposition to the indifference of the company, or I must
side with them. There could be no middle ground, and until I should
choose my conscience would give me no peace.
It was after a particularly hard day’s work and because of some special
conditions that I managed finally to reach a decision, which, however
much it may have benefited me, helped them in no least way. We had been
mixing concrete and, a touch of my old cynical uncertainty dominating
me, I had been driving them all the day long, urging one to shovel
faster, calling to another to bring the wheelbarrows of stone almost
before they were needed, sending this one for water and that one for
cement, until the men were running about like ants. About four o’clock
of this long day it began to rain. It had been gray and lowery all day
but now the moisture descended in a fine drizzle and we were compelled
to work or leave unfinished the batch of concrete we were just
beginning. In a sullen mood, because of my own dreary part in this, I
stood and held them to their task, not caring much what became of them
or myself either, until at last the work was completed. At dusk, damp
and dreary, I took my lunch-box and tramped doggedly along the tracks
toward the depot, comforted by one thought only: that the day was over
and I myself was free.
It was at that hour when the traffic outward from the great city assumes
its most imposing aspect. Along this magnificent highway of steel were
speeding the trains of one of the wealthiest corporations in the world.
Limiteds were passing, their splendid interiors aglow with half a
hundred lights. Seemingly more prosperous citizens than we were
reclining there in comfort. Others were gazing out idly. The dining cars
of various trains were set with silver and white linen.
As I paused near the station to turn my eye on this truly appealing
scene and to gather its significance as contrasted with that which I had
just left, there passed by, going in my direction, the little procession
of Italians over whom I ruled, bearing with them the tools with which
they had been laboring. There was Philip, whom I had often noted as I
stood beside the trench in which he was working, his body all twisted
and bent from long years of unremitting toil; there was Angelo, old and
leathern in feature, whose one boast was that he had never missed a
day’s work in seventeen years; there was Matteo, thin, spare,
worn-looking, whose eye was alight with a kindly humor and whose
willingness to work I had never been able to question; there were John
and Collarbrace (as we called one Calabrian), Mussolin and Jimmie, all
trudging patiently onward like cattle, the day of their labor having
brought forth nothing but a night of weariness.
And as I stood there looking at them I could not help contrasting the
weariness of their labor with this (one of many, many), flowers which
it, or labor like it, had produced at the top. Here was this immerse
corporation with its magnificent equipment, its palatial depots, its
comfortable trains speeding onward bearing their burdens of the
comfortable (?) and the more fortunate (?), and here at the very bottom
were these humble trudgers making their way homeward in the night and
the rain. And as I thought of the meagerness of their wages, the manner
in which I had driven them, and the profitless luxury, in so far as they
were concerned, to which their labor trended, I resolved that I, for
one, would have nothing more to do with it.
Not to drive where I could not ease, not to urge where I could not
repay, not to be a tool in the hands of their indifferent masters who
could not or would not interest themselves in them, was something, even
though my ceasing could not relieve them of their toil.
PERSONALITY
In the last analysis personality appears to be a sense of power resting
on a feeling of capability or wisdom and usefulness, and hence a right
to be; or this may be reversed for some and it be said to be a sense of
capability or usefulness which springs from inherent wisdom and power.
At best it is inexplicable to the individual himself. He does not know
from whence it comes, why he has it, why he of all people should have it
and so many other billions not, why his thoughts should be large where
those of others are so small, his cunning or subtlety great where those
of so many others are obviously less. If he has in addition any charm of
character, being thus endowed, he will be courteous, considerate,
merciful; but it by no means follows that he must so have or be. That
would not explain an Attila, an Alaric, a Can Grande or a Torquemada.
“Why should I be born with a great mind,” a Cæsar, a Shakespeare, a
Hannibal or a Leonardo might well have asked of himself, “whereas so
many have little ones? Why is my frail bark speeded by winds of destiny
or chance over favorable seas to power, where so many are beached or
foundered en route? Did I make myself? Did I foreknow all?” Where so
profound an egoist, even with a minute brain, to claim so much?
The truth is all good things are gifts, a voice, strength of body, vigor
of mind, vision, the power to lead, as in war, any art, beauty, charm.
This is not to say that these things may not be technically improved,
and are, but this is the business with which mediocrity is chiefly
concerning itself. I know that the world, where it lacks the strength
to think on the subject, thinks differently, but this is mere nonsense
and without import.
The man of personality or destiny realizes the guidance, enmity or favor
of not necessarily higher, we will say, but different powers. (I am not
for saints, guardian _angels_, Buddhas, Christs, perfect gods all.) He
realizes all too keenly the element of chance, luck, unpropitious as
well as propitious hours. Sometimes, in spite of himself and to his
wonder, he notes that his affairs prosper. “There is a tide--” At other
times (and who has not realized this?), try as he will, he had better
lay aside all effort and disappear. Fortune will have none of him. The
furies hover over his path. Harpies beset him. Go where he will, there
will be elements to annoy him, if no more than an ill wind to blow his
cap away or to cast dust into his eyes. He, above all others, knows that
time and chance happen to all men.
But it is so easy to cite the old-time virtues of honesty, stability,
truthfulness, fair-dealing, etc., as proving character, its value, and
the power of any one, however weak or defective, personally to achieve
it. But always, in spite of the advocates of simple and normal and moral
things as proving in themselves genius and worth, there is something
more--magnetism, for instance, a thing not necessarily or solely a part
of these other so-called virtues, and strength, assurance, courage,
generous or the reverse. These are not things of ethical import
necessarily, but they make for success just the same. Observe that youth
admires color, flare, pugnacity, brute courage and daring; middle age,
knowledge of sorts, aggressiveness, endurance, success; old age, wisdom,
generosity, humility, etc. How many of the former are ethical? In the
quiet halls of learning or reflection certain of the tabulated virtues
may be extolled, but to whom does the world pay attention, to whom has
it paid attention? Darius, Artaxerxes, Alexander, Cæsar, Hannibal,
Attila, Alaric, Peter the Hermit, Napoleon, the Kaiser; possessing what
of all these virtues? Cæsar kind, patient, honest, truthful? Napoleon
the same? Antony the same? Attila the same? Not even the popes, the
preachers, the founders of religion were so. Always craft, force,
diplomacy; but little of the sacrificial media so extolled and commended
to the rank and file in order to keep them at rest.
It is significant of the intellectual development of America, if not of
other countries, that we hear less these days of _character_, that
something or somewhat which we were all supposed to have, or at least
develop for ourselves or make (!) à la Washington, Lincoln, Grant, etc.,
who in most American schoolbook essays and college addresses were and
still are supposed to have _made_ their skill, endurance,
resourcefulness, etc.; and more of that other thing which we call
personality and which for a long time apparently we were not supposed to
have, that unexplainable, inescapable something with which we come and
in which even here in America we are now beginning to believe. Yes, we
are beginning to suspect that there are certain things which some of us
cannot do, however much we may wish or try to. Also that ability in many
realms and forms comes without volition on our part, fate and
circumstance causing it to blaze for us whether we will or no. After
many volumes of another kind of mush, this is at last becoming rather
apparent. There is less talk now of being Napoleons all, adding inches
to our stature by taking thought (lifting ourselves by our boot-straps,
in other words), and more of plain effort according to our especially
inherited abilities or capacities. It is a sad truth for most men, more
especially for most Americans, when they discover it, but it is
nevertheless an economic and helpful one. Men do better once they
realize their genuine limitations and cease reaching for the moon. For
so very long, here in America at least, we have been fed on something
so very different: our inalienable ability to do anything and everything
equally well.
One wonders at times whether the light is really breaking. Can it be
that we are getting ready to admit that we are not Cæsars each and all,
held back by our own idleness and indifference? One begins to rub one’s
eyes. I have often wondered why it is that the word “common,” in its
sense of being plentiful and therefore indifferent, has not struck home
to the many of us for what it is: an expression of contempt; and that
“uncommon,” “extraordinary,” denote approbation. Why, if this is not
true, should everything that is common be held so lightly of the mass,
whereas that which is special or individual, inherited or no, is of such
intense interest to it? For example, the individual skill or personal
traits of the actor, painter, writer, sculptor, the exceptionally
talented in any field?
The truth is that the average man, dull as he is, realizes quite well
that a creature who has little or nothing that is different from
millions of his kind is of small import here or anywhere. There is no
especial demand for what he has to offer. If he wishes to stand out
above his fellows he must bring something new, and this he cannot
provide by mere wishing or thinking. There is something more than
that--inherent capacity, a something which he cannot create for himself,
try as he may. He also knows that Nature sends bubbling up from her
inexhaustible springs an infinitude of creatures who are of small
import, because they have no inherent power wherewith to develop very
special characteristics, or better yet individual impulses--in other
words, personality. They cannot, and are not asked to, create them after
they arrive here. They must have them to begin with, or they are not
important, cannot make their way easily. And again, it is obviously
quite right that a creature with qualities except those of the species
should have to confine its claim to an existence entirely within the
limits of the species, and live a life conditioned by them. If Nature
wishes one to rise above the conditions wherewith he finds himself
surrounded at birth She usually provides him with the equipment for so
doing during gestation, or before, and in addition accidental and most
opportune circumstances invariably aid him. He is the heir of most
propitious conditions. Vide Cæsar, Napoleon, Shakespeare, Luther,
Lincoln, even Goethe. Yet, it is impossible, I presume, to convince the
mass that this is true. It would be too discouraging.
Again, it is a common fallacy among the ignorant that no lower
animal possesses more than the generic characteristics of its
species--such-and-such powers, such-and-such limitations, such-and-such
instincts,--although this of course is not true. There are weak and
strong animals of the same species, more cunning and less, more
ferocious and less, better-natured and less, just as there are among
men. (If you do not believe this study cats and dogs, the historic wolf
of Cevennes in France.) Indeed in many intellectual circles, so-called,
it is still claimed for man that he is the only one to possess
individual character. But this is not true, as the “Origin of Species”
plainly shows. Sometimes I think that man, take him by and large,
presents less differences than some of the individuals of species of the
so-called lower animals. He is supposed to reason more, but does he? It
seems to me that the average cat reasons quite as well as the average
plumber or grocer, if not better. Give a good pagan tomcat a man’s body
and sensory capacity, and how long do you suppose he would remain a
plumber? The truth is that man, somewhat confused at present in his
response to those chemic instincts which appear originally to have
guided him, has been all but done for mentally by vain isms and
theories. At times these same appear to be able, and quite completely,
to do for him mentally, as does cancer and tuberculosis for him
physically--vide Christianity, Mohammedanism, Shintoism, etc. On the
other hand, the animal has no such handicap, let us say, as Catholicism,
Shintoism, or what Mohammed or Buddha or Zoroaster said. It has just
life and its own bare wits or chemical responses wherewith to do, no
restraining and deadening rules. Hence it has very marked personality at
times, and makes its way exceedingly well and without restraint or
deadening aid of community or mass governmental advice. This is true of
snakes, birds, fishes, monkeys and all other creatures _lower_,
so-called, than man.
In most men, individual character, that thing which is supposedly so
superior to lower animals, comes to very little. They run in schools,
join secret orders or churches, vegetate, label themselves in a dull way
democrats, republicans, socialists, and strive in all ways to make
themselves as like others (those within their immediate ken) as
possible. My father, for instance (peace to his spirit!), wished to
prepare himself by self-abnegation, prayers and good works here on earth
to fit himself for an entirely mythical heaven, to be a standardized
angel--wings, harp, robes and all--such as he saw in the “saint
pictures” in the various Catholic churches which he attended from time
to time. These were the only representations of the future life with
which he was familiar, hence he accepted them as true! Indeed as a rule
the average or ordinary man (fortunately there is no exact average)
cannot think or see beyond his quite immediate environment and binding
rules, his neighborhood, his church, what somebody else says or thinks.
A plumber wants to be exactly like the next successful plumber he sees;
a grocer, the same; an undertaker, the same. Most rich men would like to
live in a house like that of all the other rich men they know. Show them
the very different house of a rich man in Spain, in Egypt, in India, in
Japan--it would never, never do. It is not like that which they know.
Their thoughts and desires, like their faces, are those of the species
to which they belong. In the main, they are of a trivial, commonplace
character, as unimportant as a bean or a pea. Like animals of so limited
a mentality as the duck and the penguin, if you know one you know all.
You might almost say that they have come to their end spiritually.
Nothing can be done for them. Some more vigorous active thing--i. e.,
the thinking, restless, dissatisfied individual--must come along to
rebel and push them aside. If ever the surface of the commonplace is to
be disturbed the individual moved by some inherited or bestowed impulse
must do it: Luther, Galileo, Keppler, Newton, Columbus.
Anything that is strong, special, different must, as a matter of course
and by its very nature, stand alone in the world where so many things
are not strong, special, different. That which places one being over
another and sets differences between man and man is not alone intellect
or knowledge, as some would have us believe (Schopenhauer, for one), but
these plus, other things being equal, the vital energy to apply them or
the hypnotic power of attracting attention to them--in other words,
personality. It is that peculiar quality or ability which makes a way
for our plans, desires, dreams. Cunning, which is by no means knowledge
in the sense in which we use that word, nor intellect of a high order
perhaps (although it may well be), still may play a magnificent share in
personality and contribute to its triumph. No truer book than
Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” although it earned him the distinction of
equaling the devil, was ever written, although the necessary gift of
hypnotic personality was by no means sufficiently insisted upon. Was not
one of the amazing qualities of Julius Cæsar, as of Hannibal, Napoleon
and, indeed, most of the outstanding figures of history, cunning? The
average man, realizing his own limitations, does not like to believe it,
but it is none the less true. Did Alexander the Great, for instance,
lack it? Or Lincoln? On the other hand, mere strength without cunning
is so little. Contrast the tiger and the Norman horse or an elephant.
Which of the three is truly superior? Which one commands your innate
respect?
Whatever else you do, believe nothing in regard to the individual’s
ability to develop an especial and remarkable capacity, unless it is
already inherent in him at birth. Nature works in no other way. Another
thing, life cannot do without brains, however much disassociated from
beatific virtues these may be; for these are a gift and can no more be
created here than you can add to your height by taking thought. What
life does is to develop and train especial inherent capacities--an eye,
a hand, a taste, a smell perhaps; but the instinct and the ability to
foreknow, to appreciate, understand--these things are not taught in
schools. Schools labor with them to improve, polish, give them a special
turn or bent; little more and little less.
A COUNSEL TO PERFECTION
Brief as are the sensations of success, victory, happiness, etc., yet
these are things of actually some duration and as such can be looked
forward to and back upon with pleasure, which in itself is a kind of
reward for living. Love is real, a kinetic vibration of great comfort
and a reward, as well as are the gratifications which arise from a sense
of wealth or power or any hunger satiated. All these may be exceedingly
brief and do fade, but however brief and however quickly faded they
endure for at least a minute fraction of time and are therefore, and
legitimately so, the basis of much human hope, ambition, delight, as
well as despair and all the other contraries which might otherwise be
inexplicable. The pathetic thing in connection with them all is that
they are so plainly baits as well as rewards, that they do prove man to
be the victim or evoluted mechanism if not tool of some higher, perhaps
scheming force by no means essentially friendly to, if it is even
conscious of, him, and that an enduring state of pleasure for anything
is not contemplated by Nature as an essential portion of the career of
man; also that it may be by no means concerned as to whether or no man,
its tool, achieves any moments of triumph or satiation.
Looking at most lives--the defeated, the hungry, the poorly equipped
mentally and physically, the homely, those seized on in childhood by the
strong and shrewd and made to serve pointless and wretched purposes
entirely alien to their lives--I should say that Nature does not care
and that distinctly for them life may not be worth its pains. On the
other hand, where crass chance lifts a given organism to great power or
builds it with such care that it is an almost perfect and delicately
responsive machine, life may well be and no doubt is worth all its
costs. Many organisms, by accident of dullness or non-responsiveness of
a higher sort, come off with less pain, and Nature, either accidentally
or intentionally, builds most of these. They are machines well suited to
the rough grind of material and psychic forces, and may be said to
strike such a neat equation with the circumstances of life that they
achieve a kind of sensory comfort or satiation and so do well enough.
Again, dulling religion or illusions of one type and another, fatuitous
hopes far beyond the pale of possibility, sensory response of a
comfortable character to this earthly scene as a spectacle, or depleted
nervous energy or force which reduces many to the point where nervous or
sensory response is lacking, eases many to the place where it may be
said that if they do not enjoy keenly they at least do not suffer
keenly.
But is man happy? Is his game worth the candle? The sophisticated reply
that the fear of death proves that life is worth while, since all are so
eager to avoid it. But this is worse than no answer for it predicates
either no life at all, which is certainly no recommendation, or that
there may be worse things _there_ than those which befall man
_here_--certainly no proof of a keen joy in this.
The essential tragedy of life, then, and the thing which makes it
painful to consider, is this: that once man is raised above the
non-cerebrating and automatic sensory responsiveness of the beast he
becomes conscious of the rather obvious fact that he is either an
intelligently or an accidentally evoluted mechanism or minute tool in
the hands of something so much more significant than himself that he is
as nothing; and again, that to this force or intelligence above him his
little earthly schemes bear about as much relationship as do those of an
office boy bent on becoming a baseball pitcher to those of the Standard
Oil Company or the German Emperor bent on world dominion. And again--and
this is the darkest thought of all--it, our personal Creator, assumed by
the religionists at least to be so careful of our individual welfare,
may be little more than the veriest tyro in so far as the larger and
largest creative forces or impulses in the universe are concerned.
Manifesting little or no interest in us, no more perhaps than is needful
to its own welfare, it may be as little to the powers above it as are we
to it. For who can guess whether the thing or power which makes man is
the ultimate power or guiding force in so spacious a thing as the
universe? Already our chemists and physicists are inclined to doubt it.
Its impulses, humors, appetites and methods, as manifest in man, are by
no means of so glorious or illuminating a character as to inspire
admiration, even in its machine: man. Plainly, its methods and actions
bespeak as much of the lowest as of the highest that we know, and this
is as much evidenced by the thoughts, aspirations, tastes or habits,
chemically compulsory or no, of man, its product, and through whom it
seemingly expresses itself, as by its methods and procedure in other
ways, fumbling efforts and failures of all kinds. For man in his
capacity as chemist, physicist, fumbling philosopher, didactic or
synchronetic poet, experimenter or agnostic is scarcely a fit creature
for one to contemplate as the highest product of a so-called supreme
intelligence or God, or Good, however well he might look as the product
of a minor and so seeking hieratic power. For if God, or Good, as so
many have already pointed out, can do no better than produce the
quarreling, eating, seeking, spewing thing we know as man--and that is
the chief concern of His intelligence--!!!
We will assume that you have read at least a simple work on astronomy or
chemistry or physics. If so, could you possibly believe that the present
intelligence of man, or even any conceivable progress which he can make
in his present limited form and with his present equipment of senses,
would be of sufficient force to gather either the meaning or sensory
impact of spaces, distances, weights, relationships which at present,
except in the most minute and fragmentary way, are entirely beyond him?
Consider the meaninglessness of numbers to you, of great weights,
distances. I for one would be the last to cast a shadow upon man’s
dreams or pride, but when one investigates even the little we are
permitted to know--the darkness, the inexplicable confusion, the
non-reason in all the things we think, believe, hope for--it would, at
the least, suggest that æons must elapse and man himself change
radically and develop powers (which, if they are his at all at present,
are in embryo) before he could begin to conceive of the significance of
even the smallest of the forces which he seems to use but which in
reality use him.
All the great things, the creative impulses and substances such as
produce even the most minute forms of life which at present we can see,
are entirely outside the range of his limited group of senses. He does
not know, for instance, where heat or cold begin or end; what shades lie
beyond the outer edges of the spectrum; what are the limits or the
immediate beyond of sound, light, weight, space, etc. His weak senses
plus his devised instrumental aids offer him no real help. They merely
multiply his difficulties. Something has invented an eye, an ear, an
olfactory nerve, the ganglia of the fingertips, the central cerebral
cortex and so-called reason, all of which appear to be nothing more than
assembled and synchronized reactions to other and unknown stimuli,
wherewith it is possible now for man to apprehend only minute portions
of the immense energies and substances blowing about him. Yet with all
these aids and the evidences of the mechanism of the universe outside
him which they yield, still man, attacking special bits and portions,
finds it quite impossible to suggest the reason for anything. He lacks
the equipment and power, which even the thing which made him may not
have, of creating such finer perceptive organs as might aid him. At
present and at best apparently, he is allowed only to invent some
things--such, for instance, as are or may be useful to the propagation
and rearing of man in the matter of numbers, not brains. His Creator
apparently is either unable or unwilling to endow him with such
equipment as might make for great knowledge. Tremendous psychic
opportunities appear and go by, as when a duller and more ignorant Rome
conquers a sensitive and highly perceptive and meditative Greece. Owing
to his minor equipment, ignorance and vain beliefs flourish, and he
stumbles from one vain illusion and delusion to another--to achieve
what? Something, possibly, which his Creator can use. Or so it would
seem.
But it is not this phase alone which is troublesome. One might and does
get along well enough knowing but a minute portion of that which, it
would seem, our immediate Creator must plainly know concerning the
processes by which we arrive, depart and function during our little stay
here, but to a seeking intelligence there is inescapable tragedy in the
plain implication, written large over everything, that to the accidental
Creator of man the largest intelligence of whatsoever bent or character
among him is of no more importance to the ruling force than the veriest
gnat or leaf. It, whatever it is that makes man and the animal,
manufactures intelligences as though they were buttons or pins, and
though it create from time to time an Anaximander, a Plato, an
Alexander, a Socrates, a Keppler, a Newton, a Leonardo or any other
titanic brain, yet to it the least ditch-digger or wastrel is as
important. The mass is everything, the individual nothing. With the
greatest nonchalance or blundering inconsequence it strikes down a
Hertz, a Raphael, a Curie, a Spinoza, a Schubert, a Keats. Seventy years
is the allotted span for all, great or small, an average amount of
strength, the same stomach and blood capacity. Though an individual had
seemingly the most important ideas under consideration, great schemes
wherewith to benefit or further the so-called progress of man (the
especial care, as we learn, of his Maker), still this is of no least
importance to his Creator. It is invariably on, on, out of the way, as
though the Creator had most carefully arranged not to take advice from
any one He made, or as though a blind process were at work which could
not. If the former, one might say small blame to one so powerful.
Presuming Him even moderately intelligent, how unimportant His little
mannikins must be to the ultimate scheme of things, the giant forces
through which He manifests Himself and which grind, helplessly create,
helplessly control! Imagine taking advice from a loaf of bread you had
accidentally evolved, or listening to the protests or advice of a
ginger-snap of your own creating!
Nevertheless if it were possible in the face of the driving forces which
seem wholly to manipulate him to reach man and by a suggestion aid him,
it would be that in the face of so much confusion he no longer wastes
time on theories wholly unrelated to himself or his own material
welfare, his essential necessities here, but rather that he see to it
first of all, and clearly, that his life here is something which is to
be lived here and now to the utmost, in the best form for all--during
seventy years, if not longer--here, and not elsewhere, and that some
reasonable and concentrated effort be made to make it livable for man
here and now instead of elsewhere, however glittering or picturesque
that elsewhere may be, thin romance that it is. For is it not high time
that we all realized how essential it is to make life worth while for
all here, knowing as we now do that man is not a pet in Nature and that
if he makes anything of himself and his social as well as his mental
state here it must be with the full understanding that he can expect but
little if any aid from Nature or the forces directing him, certainly
none that would tend to ultimately enlarge his own mental clarity and
supremacy. To this end therefore it would seem advisable that man as a
whole throw over as swiftly as possible all his old-time religious and
moral conceptions, his restraining conventions, taboos and the like, and
re-examine for himself the data concerning which, accidentally or
otherwise, he now finds himself capable of cerebrating and according to
which he is now supposed to regulate his life. It may not be true that
he should limit himself as his present theories and ethics suggest. And
furthermore, his greatest problem being that of living longer, of being
stronger, happier, not so much the butt and jest of chance or the
willful or indifferent moods of the surrounding and stronger forces in
Nature, that he devote himself entirely to solving those problems.
Elsewhere I have indicated a possibly broader moral conception which may
be of value to this end. One of the greatest achievements, of course,
would be to rid the human mind of all vain illusion concerning things
spiritual, to get it to see, if it were possible, that man is not
necessarily an enduring spiritual creature endowed--for who can
know?--with an enduring and progressive soul, but rather that he is an
implement or tool in the hands of something else which is creating or
using him as, for example, the vine does the leaf, yet which itself may
be of no great import in Nature.
If, by any process of investigation, and as now seems possible, it could
be proved that man’s Creator is no universal lord by any means but a
blind fumbling force, it should be possible for man to do one of two
things: either ally himself strictly with such impulses and instincts as
he can detect as coming from this lesser and plainly more immediate
Creator--many of them plainly non-moral enough, as we may see by like
impulses in him, and so aid this Creator to discover Himself; or, now
that he has a foothold here and appears to be a fairly self-perpetuating
machine, to endeavor to reveal to himself and for himself the secret of
self-creation and perpetuation and so become the equal of the force or
forces now using him. But to that end he would need to rid himself of
the delusion that anything in life should be accepted in blind faith and
without question as permanent. One of the oldest of the Hebraic sayings
is “My son, get wisdom, get understanding,” and a later saw declares
“Knowledge is power,” and so it is. Adam, in the fable of the genesis of
man, was condemned not so much for eating of the Fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge as for the fact that “in the day ye eat thereof your eyes
shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” And
Prometheus (forethought), the other “God” who is supposed to have
created man out of earth and water and who for man’s benefit “stole fire
from heaven in a hollow tube” and taught him all the useful arts, was
punished for this by Zeus, the supreme “God,” by being chained to a rock
and having his liver daily torn by an eagle--certainly a most
significant fable, for he was trying to make something of man, or rather
teaching man to help himself, and this the Supreme Ruler of the Universe
did not want, probably for the same reason that the Hebraic “God” wanted
Adam to remain a dull machine or clod.
But the Greek fable is far more hopeful and significant than is the
Hebraic one, for, in the former, strength (Hercules) subsequently slew
the eagle and released Prometheus, or forethought, thus allowing him to
aid man; while in Genesis man is condemned, slave-like and forever
after, to “eat his bread in the sweat of his face,” a very sharp
commentary on the nature of his Maker as the ancients conceived him.
What is implied by both fables is that man is a waif or accident in
Nature, not intentionally endowed with wisdom or the power to get it,
and that Nature (Zeus, Jehovah, anything you will) markedly objects to
his obtaining any “lest he become as one of us” and “put forth his hand
and take also of the Tree of Life and eat and live forever.”
In view of this one might ask, Is life worth living? Is there any use?
Perhaps there would be if man, accidentally evoluted or not, but coming
at last, by accident or not, to the place where he finds himself able to
reason upon the processes which have brought him thus far, could seize
upon the constructive processes and so begin a creative, constructive
career of his own which would redound to his own benefit and comfort and
none other. Only there is no least evidence as to that yet, i. e., that
it is possible. In so far as one may judge by chemistry and physics man
appears to be in the grip of a blind force or process which cannot help
itself and from which man can derive no power to help himself save by
accident or peradventure. Even now, for all one can know, he may be
sinking into a blind, unreasoning mush instead of evoluting further, so
many are the theories which counsel him to believe in some vague,
aimless peace hereafter and which he so readily accepts. The important
thing for him to do, supposing that he could, would be to avoid
henceforth all destroying notions of this character and to think of
himself rather as a waif, an unloved orphan in space, who must
nevertheless and by his own effort make his own pathetic way in the
world. Or, if that is too harsh, then to think of himself as part and
parcel (leaf and vine) of some hard-pressed Creator, a sun, a group of
chemic forces synthetized into an individual somewhat like himself, not
a Supreme God, by any means, but a kind of local manufacturer or
well-meaning Prometheus who is trying to make something out of man and
Himself at the same time, being in or of man, or man in Him (“I am in
the Father; the Father is in me”), but who in turn and so through him,
man, is being assailed by larger or rival forces and cannot always make
His way as well as He might wish. Hence, He needs the consideration and
even help of man, the atomic force of which He is composed. That being
the case, the burden of life might possibly come to seem less hard.
But, aside from such an hypothesis, thought offers but small comfort to
the thinker viewing the drift of fact as one must. For see how painfully
and often most sadly our scientists and philosophers dig at this riddle
of existence and how slowly, if at all, we are really fitting ourselves
for the giant task, these greater and greater contests with Nature,
which must come if man is to come to anything. Even individual
self-preservation via chemistry, physics, mathematics, economics,
sociology, philosophy, astronomy, botany, biology, and what not, is a
slow and difficult process. On every hand are destructive forces that
beset us, and we have apparently only ourselves to look to that we be
not so persistently tortured. All religions and theories of Divine aid
to the contrary, man has been and is now compelled to battle hourly and
momentarily for his “right” (how pale is that word!) to live and grow,
let alone think--against heat, cold, destructive rivals and enemies of
all kinds, destructive insects, savage animals, savage men, droughts,
storms, dissensions, diseases, death--whereas he in turn has sought and
does now seek to help himself via farmers, butchers, inventors,
scientists, doctors, seeking to wrest from forces apparently alien to
the one which prospers him, if there is such an one, some of the powers
which apparently they hold in such vast abundance and which might even
contain the secret of eternal life. Who knows? Indeed, surveying what
has befallen him throughout the ages, I should suggest to man that he
accept as true the fabled statement made by “God” in Genesis iii. 14:19,
and seek persistently and without too much reverence for some method of
solving his own difficulties. He should reject vain theory, especially
that which relates to a mythical reward hereafter, and cling only to
those methods and forms of procedure which give promise or hope of a
larger reward here, tending to strengthen his capacity for living here
and now. Such a theory or belief, however antagonistic to current
religious theories, would at least tend to make man less depressed and
indifferent to his state here and more conscious of the fact that if he
is to extract any joy out of his span he must think and plan to make
things better not only for himself but for others, since joy for himself
depends upon his joy in others and they in him. Indeed, it would give
him more zest for the game here if he did. By that last I am not arguing
with the moralists for all their shabby, little pinchbeck repressions,
the idea that the less you do and know the better you are; but rather
that the more you do and know the better off you are, physically and
mentally, and the more you make your state or form of government do and
let you know the better.
How soon would not such an attitude--not on the part of all, for one
cannot hope for that, but of even a moderate minority--make for a more
vivid, aggressive, fascinating world! How soon might not the now
seemingly sealed doors open, unsolvable (so-called) riddles end as
solved, man acquire new reasoning faculties, senses and powers, and
finally stand forth a creative force himself, a genuine creator on his
own account, able not only to fend and forefend against many of his
present disasters here but to give new powers and thought, and even
creative force, to things which now crawl meekly at the feet of man? Who
knows? Is not courage better than fear? a healthy, if skeptical, seeking
better than blind, dull acceptance of anything or nothing, as the case
may be? I, for one, think so, and, for my part, would prefer to be a
seeking Prometheus chained to a rock and my liver gnawed daily by the
eagle of an irritated and jealous higher power than a crawling worm or
whimpering slave praying for some endless Nirvana, or a minute part in
an endless legion of cherubim harping the glory of something which had
plainly sought neither my peace nor my significance but only my painful,
unimportant and even worthless service.
NEUROTIC AMERICA AND THE SEX IMPULSE
I sometimes think that a calm and exhaustive study of the American
temperament in relation to sex and its various manifestations would
result in the scientific conclusion that this country, taken as a whole,
is as much a victim of a deep-seated neurosis relating to this impulse
as any, the most morbid of those who appeal to psycho-analysis for
treatment. The profound and even convulsive interest in any case
involving a sex crime or delusion (Thaw, Leo Frank, Billy Brown,
Carlisle Harris, Nan Patterson, Durant; or any negro rape case in the
South); the ridiculous and quite neurotic interest displayed by grown
men and women, to say nothing of children, in the exploits of so-called
“cuties”--the “Spring Blossoms,” “June Elfs,” “Violet Dawns” of the
movies--the perennial and astonishingly profitable (in so far as a
certain class of theatrical management is concerned) interest of the
male and even female American in the utterly mechanical and standardized
beauty chorus shows with their (presumably) seventeen-year-old maids in
bathing, bedroom-bath and other forms of abbreviated attire! Are not
these points in evidence? In the matter of the latter, no story is
necessary; just erotic color, music, dancing evolutions and double-meant
(I almost said “mint”) jokes, and the thing is done.
Again, look at any American city where morality or religion, or both,
presumably have full sway (and in what American city are they not
supposed to be dominant?), and what do you find? The most desirable
locations in the best portions of the city, outside of the trade
centers, given over to the leading churches and the newspapers, which
preach a lofty code of ethics and morals which they themselves find
difficult if not impossible to practice; while elsewhere the local
bookstores and picture shops and bill-boards are crowded with a class of
literature and illustration, or so-called “art,” which to read or view,
according to the adjacent churches and newspapers, would result in the
loss of your immortal soul as well as your local standing. And yet these
same are displayed, sold and read plentifully and with avidity, for the
very good reason, no doubt, that they satisfy a craving and a thirst not
otherwise open to satiation. In any town of any size, what pictures are
not displayed and sold: “September Morn,” “Youth,” “Purity,”
“Innocence,” “Yes,” “Waiting,” and the like, disguised as little as the
law will permit. Again, where will you not find a swarm of sex magazines
labeled “breezy,” “snappy” and the like, the kind that any
sex-suppressed neurotic might well crave, and all received with the
profoundest gratitude and widest distribution? Where in America, any
more than abroad (barring countries of Asia, Africa and the South
Pacific, where sex-suppression is not the order of the day) does one
lack for pornographic nudes or privately circulated writings of the most
lurid character? Are the art or book or drug stores of the small towns
free of them? Is it not true that you can still buy almost everywhere,
“Three Weeks,” “Life’s Shop Window,” “The Yoke,” and other such
classics, whereas those admirable volumes of life and satire “The
Decameron,” “Droll Stories,” “The Confessions,” Cellini, are only to be
discovered, and that by chance and peradventure and “against the law,”
on the dark and musty shelves of some out-of-the-way old book store, and
these consumed by the intelligensia and the sex-satisfied only, and with
an upward mouth-curl of amusement at the innate humors of passion? The
hobble-skirt, the tango dance, the Hula-Hula or Hawaiian melodies--what
did each in its day indicate? Plays like “Everywoman,” “Experience,”
“The Girl from Rector’s,” “Parlor, Bedroom and Bath”--what did they
suggest?
Not so very long since, I stopped for a little while in a town of a
hundred thousand population in the South. It was moral, religious,
conventional--in other words, American. It might as well, however, have
been in New England, the Northwest, the Southwest, the Middle West, for
any difference to be discovered in its moral texture. In this home of
chivalry, courtesy, purity and the like, erected originally on the backs
of driven slaves, a number of its most interesting points of vantage
were as usual occupied by the churches, as impressive and prosperous as
those anywhere. It had only one theater of consequence, and that open
only two nights a week, if so often. Its poorer classes were entertained
by three or four moving-picture establishments (“Passed by the National
Board of Censors”); but the well-to-do also attended these, for they had
no other place to go for amusement. Yet, in the face of the highly
censored “movies,” theater and bookstores and the absence of houses of
ill-repute (all suppressed), there were two or three “first-class”
hotels, all with their Thès Dansantes, cabaret suppers and the like, of
the character of which I propose to speak later. The most exclusive
bookstore was so very moral that it would not carry any books not
approved by the “Watch and Ward” and “Library Protection” association,
nor would the vine-covered library in the best section, although at any
time you might have gone to the principal dry-goods store and by a
roundabout process secured nearly all that you desired.
While I was in this city a twelve-year-old boy was arrested at one of
the railroad stations about two hundred yards from the principal beach
for appearing in a two-piece bathing suit. It was not asserted in the
prosecution which followed (which was vigorously defended by his father)
that a twelve-year-old boy in a two-piece bathing suit was immoral, but
a man in a one-piece one or a girl in any kind at all would be, and to
avoid the possible vitiation of public purity which might thus follow
the boy was arrested. He was discharged with a warning--but even so. You
can see how high the virtue at this city should be.
Yet, at the same time, in this same city, were the three aforementioned
hotels with their Thès Dansantes, roof gardens, cabaret grills, this,
that and the other, and in these might have been seen, any late
afternoon or evening, winter and summer, such a collection of sex-struck
infants and elders as would be worth the same price of admission
anywhere. The clothes! The wondrous shoes and gaudy purses, the subdued
and yet moving and suggestive combination of colors! The efforts to
flagellate the already too harried imagination with a promise of
delights which the local morality squad, I fear, would never permit to
be realized. You could pay as much in either of these places for a pot
of tea and three little thin slices of toast as you could anywhere in
the world. In their efforts to provide you with a superior (sex)
atmosphere they made it possible for you so to do.
Wrong? Not a bit. I am not describing it for that purpose; nor am I
quarreling with human nature for expressing its inmost desires, being
what it is: avid, alluring, secret, hungry. I am smiling at the
anachronistic spirit of the same community which would arrest the boy in
the bathing suit, prohibit “near beer,” snip every even weakly
suggestive passage out of a “movie,” “run” any indecent play (“Hedda
Gabler,” let us say, or “The Wild Duck,” since it could not understand
them) out of town. No copies of “The Song of Songs,” Rousseau’s
“Confessions,” “The Decameron,” or the unexpurgated “Arabian Nights.”
Never, never, never! Yet look at these same hotels, these girls and
youths clinging to each other in the suggestive dances! The movements,
the sinuous, almost savage, abandon, the love-looks, the whispers! And
the automobiles lined up along distant country roadsides in the dark
later--although not a single house of assignation or prostitution was
tolerated within the city limits. One had to secure a Ford and employ
the open woods and fields instead. And in the basement next to the
barbershop in each hotel was one or more “manicure booths,” curtained
confessionals or recessionals, into which one might retire with a
manicure maid to have one’s fingers done. Owing to the dashing quality
of these maids the business was large.
For myself, I do not know what the psychic or spiritual or creative
significance of these impulses of the sexes may be, unless, in truth,
within equational limits they are moral or at least essential, and so to
be cherished as a good instead of an evil; but one thing is certain:
their appearance in this florid public form and in the center of a
vice-cured city would indicate that either the attitude of the nation is
wrong or that we have in our midst a host of neurotic or sex-struck
degenerates who ought to be eliminated from the body civic in a very
radical manner. But are they neurotic? Or is it the nation that is
wrong, and these but the neurotic symptoms of its error? Certainly,
nowhere outside of America and especially in such a vice-taboo realm as
this, I fancy, are the terrors of sex excess, the degradation and
disease following sex libertinage, more enthusiastically or more
glowingly pointed out as the psychic or spiritual aftermath or heavenly
punishment of these “sins”; and, yet, for all the length of time these
horrors have been “known” or insisted upon or pointed out, and
regardless of whether they are really true or not, is there any marked
diminution of the so-called sex evil in America? Has the denying of
drink or prophylactics to the American sailor or soldier cured him of
his interest in sex? Will it? The world apparently, or that part of it
expressed by, in or through the sexes, is as avid and seeking as ever.
We know, or some of us do, that the chemistry by which we and the sex
impulse are compounded is above the knowledge or volition of man,
although its object in so far as human moods and passions are concerned,
is plain enough. But in America we are not willing, if we do know, to
admit it. Our increasing numerical presence here should be evidence
enough of its force, but we waive that in favor of our theories in
regard to the inherently moral and Christian home--even the complete
suppression of sex! That a balance or equation between excess and
license and inane, mollusc-like passivism in regard to sex and its
expression is all that is ever struck in Nature, is plain enough to
those who think; but that an American in authority in state or church
should admit it! Life, apparently, is never exact in anything, and the
desirability of having it so is of course open to question. But
still----
Yet, to me, the impulses we are trying to suppress are, this side of
excess, perfectly normal, while the thing we think we want is an
infantile conception of life and its processes, unsuited to thinking men
and women. Our conviction is apparently that sexuality is essentially
wrong and debasing, and yet we do not really think so, as our intense
national interest in every phase of sex proves. We are afraid to face
ourselves honestly and openly in anything, neurotically so, and that is
what makes the American intellect so utterly contemptible and negligible
at times. What is nearer the truth is that our attitude is to be
psychoanalytically traced in various ways to the strangely exaggerated
(neurotic, I think) conceptions of the part sex or its over-emphasis
plays in life due to repression, which have followed upon impossible
religious theories brought from abroad (Quaker, Methodist, Puritan,
Mennonite, Catholic), and our reaction to them. These have developed
that repressive social and biologic ignorance regarding sex
characteristic of so many American families, offspring of these sects
even when they are no longer of them. The conviction that sex is
debasing, dominant at least at this time in nearly every American mind,
I believe, is to be traced so often to these earlier experiences,
particularly with regard to parents and their views. The average
American child--and I suppose England is not much better, judging by
their novels and morals--is permitted to base its ideals of life and
social relations, especially sex relations, on this earlier pretense on
the part of parents that sex does not exist--for them at least.
So it is that we find adult boys and girls pretending, even to
themselves, that they do not know what sex is and the manner in which
children come into existence, and preachers and pretending thinkers
speaking and writing as though sex were not an all but dominant force in
life. And instead of viewing this inconceivably dull attitude as
something that needs modification and bringing ourselves to the
realization that there is nothing inherently disgraceful about having
sexual desire, or at least knowledge of it, and of eventually gratifying
it, we allow ourselves to be kept in tow of crack-brained religionists
and ethic mongers who insist on painting our very normal natures as
abnormal and so developing national neuroses and psychoses which make us
ridiculous, not only to ourselves but to every other nation. It has even
succeeded in twisting our judgments in regard to politics and economics.
For without a rational conception of the part, and the very normal part,
sex plays in life, how can there be sanity in these other things? One
cannot be wrong as to one vital point in life and right as to all
others. We continue to assert, as a nation and as individuals, that
everything sexual is wrong, while at the same time having sexual
feelings and impulses which we can scarcely disguise even to ourselves
and which we satisfy or over-compensate for in ways too ridiculous to
mention (a Billy Sunday revival, for instance; a White Slave Crusade in
which our papers blaze with sickening criticism; an insane, an
impossible pursuit of money or vice, due to the repression, of every
other normal instinct). Truly, a goose nailed to the floor by its feet
and stuffed daily to produce an enlarged and salable liver, could be no
more ridiculous or pathetic than the average American debarred from
every avenue of intelligence or effort save that which relates to money.
It is a bit curious, one cannot help remarking, that the widespread fame
and weight of such sincere and eminent investigators as Kraft-Ebbing,
Ellis, Freud and his host of followers, with all the profoundly moving
evidence of the pathos of sex-repression which they offer, has not had
more influence upon our national, if not the world’s international,
mind. The sorrows revealed! The grisly prison doors unlocked by the
patient and brilliantly revealing researches of Freud alone! The old
sorrows dragged from the depths of the repressed subconscious and at
last permitted to come forth into the light, where the fortuitous and
yet crushing weight of earthly illusion and error may be noted! And yet
they have not apparently as yet enlightened or broadened us.
At this point I would like to present a citation from the writings of
one of our leading neurologists and psychoanalysts (H. W. Frink) in
regard to the type of patient (neurotic) pouring in upon him from all
parts of America. “My own experience,” he writes (“Morbid Fears and
Compulsions,” page 224), “is that the sexual factor comes to expression
in every analysis at once, usually within the first two or three visits,
and I am sure that for this result no special technique or dexterities
are required; about all that is necessary being to let the patient talk.
To the question, Why is the sexual factor dominant in every neurosis? I
shall not attempt to make any detailed reply. The answer is perhaps to
be sought in the direction indicated by Meyer (“Discussion of Some
Fundamental Issues in Freud’s Psychoanalysis,” State Hospital Bulletin,
Vol. II, No. 4, 1910), when he says: ‘No experience or part of our life
is as much disfigured by convention as the sex feelings and ambitions.’
That is to say, if we had other impulses which throughout the whole life
of the individual were so consistently and unremittingly warped,
cramped and deformed in every conceivable and unnatural manner (as they
are in America) and they had the same strength to rebel against such
treatment as have the sex impulses, _then_ we might have neuroses in
which they and not the sex factor played the dominant role.”
For my own part, I cannot understand why it is that the human mind, and
more especially the American or Anglo-Saxon mind, unless it is regulated
by biogenetic forces over which it has no control but which have full
control over it, functions so dully in regard to sex and its import. One
would assume, from the average religious or social conception of the
time, that the sole function of sex in all its ramifications is the
production of more children, to live, work and die according to the
prescribed routine of the dullest Christian formula. But,
unquestionably, sex means much more than that. While it is true that
some of the minor professors of psychoanalysis are offering what they
are pleased to term the “sublimation of the holophilic (or sex) impulse”
into more “useful,” or, at any rate, more agreeable fields of effort via
suppression or restraint, this in my judgment is little more than a sop,
and an obvious one, to the moralists. What is actually true is that via
sex gratification--or perhaps better, its ardent and often defeated
pursuit--comes most of all that is most distinguished in art, letters
and our social economy and progress generally. It may be and usually is
“displaced,” “referred,” “transferred,” “substituted by,” “identified
with” desires for wealth, preferment, distinction and what not, but
underneath each and every one of such successes must primarily be
written a deep and abiding craving for women, or some one woman, in whom
the sex desires of any one person for the time being is centered. “Love”
or “lust” (and the one is but an intellectual sublimation of the other)
moves the seeker in every field of effort. It is the desire to enthrone
and enhance, by every possible detail of ornamentation, comfort and
color--love, sensual gratification--that man in the main moves, and by
that alone. Protean as this impulse may be, and it takes many forms, it
stands revealed as the underlying reality of a thousand astounding
impulses or disguises--pathetic, lying, simulating, denying, but the
same old impulse everywhere and under all circumstances. Refracted as it
is by opposition, misunderstanding, failure into a million glistering
and lovely or pathetic things, it may seem to be what it is not; but
hold fast, trace it back, and there, at bottom, sex appears, a craving
for love, and its accompanying sensual gratification, and there is no
other.
But the thing which is especially interesting about America is its
infantile blindness to all this and the pathetic and at least
semi-neurotic condition into which we have fallen in consequence. As one
views American life to-day it can be safely asserted that scarcely one
of a hundred America men or women view this phase of life intelligibly,
although they respond to it normally enough in some of its other phases.
Usually before their so-called vision, and between them and their daily
deeds, hangs an inane and miasmatic cloud of cant and make-believe. The
physiologically and biologically informed know, of course, how
ridiculous is the assumption that sex union is the narrowly “moral”
function which the religionists would have one believe, although moral
it may well be in some larger constructive sense, as is any other life
process, if life itself can be termed moral. But that it can involve,
without becoming profoundly ridiculous, a narrow or sectarian religious
interpretation, is open to question. That it has a sad, tragic, even
ruthless aspect (read Maeterlinck’s description of the struggles of some
flowers to be born and continue the species) is not, scientifically at
least, to be combatted. In its biological aspects it has many, many
tragic sides, although so dull is the race to all but its most
individual ambitions and needs that it cannot be expected to sense this
either. Indeed, as expressed by the impulses in man (concocted by what
psychic meditation below and on the part of what?), sex is an
unregenerate and only partially controlled passion which has more as its
aim perhaps than is dreamed of in the philosophies of man. It is a fire,
a chemical explosion, really. It concerns not so much the individual as
the race, the endless unbroken chain of men and women, however much any
individual may think it concerns him alone. Instead of denouncing the
individual for his mood in regard to all this, it might be more
important to inquire how moral in their import are the elements which
compound and bring about the explosion and to treat him as one of their
victims.
The truth no doubt is that in this much-maligned impulse which chemical
forces beyond and above the willing of men are compounding lies the
destiny of man (if he has one), only we are not as yet able to fathom
that destiny. Here we come, bottles of fluid dynamite (prepared by what
satiric super-soul, and why?), and somewhere in the world is, or may be,
another compound which will set us aflame--and we are supposed to
connect this with a narrow religious order or theory! I will admit that
for the necessities of social arrangement and relationship here, the
necessary balances and inter-adjustments that go to make up a workable
society of beings, some form of equation between the less and more avid
sexually, the too hot and the too cold, must be and is struck,
willy-nilly and regardless of individual or man’s moral theory. But by
what rule and rote? Is there so-called “justice” in it, or “reason,” or
a fixed social order or method of procedure? We see that in spite of our
fixed methods of moral procedure the tragedies continue, the waves and
flames of morality and immorality come and go. Our divorce rate! Our sex
tragedies and districts! And what guide has the individual? The Golden
Rule? A more liberal method of adjustment? In the past, Nature has
tolerated polygamy, polyandry and an abbreviated monogamy, and may do so
again. The stress and strain which the present social arrangements show
are almost premonitory.
But one thing is certain: no hard-and-fast rule governing this impulse
has worked with accuracy for any given length of time, anywhere. If
there are discovered or discoverable rules for its control and best
management in the interest of the race and so in the interest of the
Creator they have not yet been announced. We hear of the duty of
preserving the sanctity of the home, maintaining a wife and raising a
family according to the monogamic theory. Well and good. But, outside of
raising endless children to be slain in wars, vegetated in a routine
factory life, worn threadbare in a vast and internecine struggle for
existence, there is not so much to be said for that, either. Routine
home life, even an artistic breeding-pen, can scarcely be the be-all and
end-all of human existence, any more than may unrestrained license. And
however comfortable or admirable or encouraging the average home may be
to given individuals, it is not necessarily so to all. There are those
who find it confining, destroying. And, again, religionists and
theorists, moral and otherwise, as well as the great greedy syndics and
master minds in business or politics, prey upon the fruit of the home
and collect “spiritual” and material taxes and establish “spiritual” as
well as material autocracies or over-lordships which in no wise make for
sex morality any more than for the forces which destroy it. Vice,
suborned by the wealthy and powerful, as well as the avid and perverse
among the weak, feeds upon the fruit of the so-called moral home. The
bull seal still conquers his fifty or a hundred, and the weakling none.
In fact, in a so-called Christian realm the mistress abounds, and the
high divorce rate attests much private dissatisfaction with the theory.
Laws come and laws go; and still we are about where we were before. The
gardens of Aphrodite still exist. The hetæra of Greece and Rome are
still with us--in our back streets or our high-priced apartment houses.
If we no longer have our streets of the so-called “fallen” or “evil”
women, who walk in the dark, is it not because caution has become the
better part of trade? Are they not to be found behind closed doors in
response to special rings, by card of admission, in our best streets?
The endless pother! And still sex is as vigorous and dominant as ever it
was. The riant scoffers nod and smile and accept the new rules.
Personally, after all this time, my conclusion is: (1), that no
individual, however well or ill compounded physically, can make or
unmake his moods or add one jot or tittle to his moral desires or
perfections, although he and society (or convention) can exercise a
certain amount of restraint--a restraint that will almost invariably
prove irksome and which he will seek to evade; (2), that however much
theorists, hypocrites and sincere religionists, chill-blooded or
otherwise, may revile sex or attempt to restrain or destroy it, yet
Nature (God or the devil, or the two in one) permits these wild fires to
be generated in man, and, in spite of all punishments and hindrances,
sees to it that his passions overleap his fears and judgments and cause
him to do all the things that may be strictly forbidden him but which
may nevertheless be of value to the race itself; (3), that man is not
temperamentally or chemically a monogamous animal, however much the
social conditions and necessities by which he finds himself surrounded
in certain lands and times tend to make him believe so or fear, and that
a rough balance or equation is all that is ever struck between his
outward public deeds and his inner chemic condition; (4), that, to this
hour, there is no city without its percentage of prostitution or hetæra
of one grade or another; (5), that there is no city or town where some
women or girls do not walk, secretly or openly, to accomplish
prostitution and where men do not, secretly or openly, encourage and
pursue them, the chemic necessities of their being as much as poverty
impelling them to do it; (6), that there is no city or town or
countryside, anywhere, where adultery or fornication is not indulged in
outside wedlock for love or pleasure; (7), that a high percentage of men
in all walks, including priests and clergymen, look after some one type
at least of woman and lust after her; (8), that a moderate percentage of
women, in marriage and out, seek the affection of a given type of man
temperamentally or chemically agreeable or appealing to them, and offer
their bodies as a bid for or sacrifice to that affection; (9), that
women crave monogamy where their affections or the interests of their
children are involved; (10), that love of one woman or one man, or their
several or joint love of children, is likely to overlay and put at rest,
for the time being, the usual roving desires of sex; (11), that law in
all special instances is absolutely helpless before passion, powerless
either to interpret its psychology or fix a just measure of praise or
blame; (12), that convention has not made, and cannot make, any headway
against a chemical scheme of life which puts sex desires first and all
else as secondary or socially contributory.
Do I seem illogical or inclined to exaggerate? Think well over the
things I have said. The world has a partially traceable history covering
more than ten thousand years; in that time nations have risen and
fallen, law codes have come and gone, religions have dominated and been
swept away. In no law code and in no religion of any nation has the sex
question, the need of moderation, duty to family and the like, been
ignored. But in all that time the social expression of sex has never
been so much as modified, let alone done away with. The Mosaic law is
all of three thousand years old, yet what has it availed? Are our women
all pure, our men all moral? Yet, in the face of history and present-day
occurrences, the facts of divorce courts, night courts, streets crowded
with prostitution and kept women, men seeking constantly to lure women,
and vice versa, all the million and one evidences in books, plays,
newspapers and social life generally that sex is the keynote of
existence, there are those who would bar all mention of it, harry the
prostitute, unduly punish the fornicator, ostracise the woman who strays
from the path of virtue or seeks in divorce a way out of a troubled
marital state.
What to make of the brain of man under such circumstances? What to say
of the thing that causes him to fight the passion of which he is a
victim? Necessity for equation and balance in all things, a very rough
balance which cares no more for the individual “good” or “bad” than we
care for flies or gnats? Inherent love of moderation in some? Love of
peace in some? Love of the reverse in others? The tendency of all things
to become static, even passionate temperaments? Surely that, and nothing
more. Yet, aside from that, there is something which does not care for
the equation-seeking mood of either individuals or society, which is
busy manufacturing and pouring into the world new individuals with all
their new dreams, passions, lacks of equation, lack of a sense of
self-restraint, and sweeping away the old, the conservative, the
religious, sanctimonious.
One of the sanifying recourses in life is, of course, to fix one’s eye
on youth and note what it desires. Plainly, it is a fair expression of
the thing that creates it, the chemic mood of the biologic force, for
plainly it is closer to that which creates it. As the human or physical
machine ages and wears out it is prepared, and then only, to accept the
restraints and the equation which society, in order to maintain itself,
requires; but not before. In the main, youth blazes with non-equational
fires and it best represents that which makes it, the concocting chemic
impulses below or behind life. Is youth wrong? Then so is the life
impulse, for it builds youth freshly to its needs yearly, daily. The
physical laws which seem to govern the biologic impulse after it
expresses itself in the shape of youth, or man, and compels it for
purposes of social expression to submit to restraints and equation, is
another matter, inherent, perhaps, in the constitution of the universe
itself and not to be avoided by the biologic impulse or its creatures.
But this, as I have said before, does not provide us with _exact_ rules
for conducting ourselves here or how best to subdue or balance with
other things the enormous fires with which we sometimes find ourselves
lit. Better admit at once that hard-and-fast and cock-sure rules or laws
are of no avail, and trust to the crude accidents of life to caution
youth. A happy balance between the fires of youth and the fears and
chills of age may be desirable, but, freely admitting that, can it be
fixed by exact rule? We are inherent in some greater thing than
man--Nature Herself. Only She knows.
One thing is sure: we are not done with the conflict and amazing
super-impulses of sex, and are not likely to be soon. And if we were,
would life be the varied, fascinating, humorous, poetic, tragic thing we
see it to be? Suppose the moralists ruled, with their stiff and narrow
balance, and man accepted their quiescent dictates--then what? Contrast
it with some of the freer, more distinguished periods--Greece, Rome,
Italy during the Renaissance, France under the Louis, England under
Elizabeth and Charles II. Consider. I for one see no immediate solution,
and firmly believe there is none which does not end in complete mental
quiescence--balance or its equivalent, intellectual and emotional or
temperamental nothingness, decay and dissolution, with something not so
balanced and therefore alive, to supersede, if we are to have any form
of life at all.
SECRECY--ITS VALUE
In the face of a rampant and inane morality which is constantly seeking
to befog or misinterpret a world which needs to be seen quite clearly if
man is even partially to understand himself or the conditions by which
he is confronted, it is well to remember that life is secret, nearly
entirely so, in all its phases. Nature reveals Her secrets to no man,
save grudgingly and peradventure. By dint of slow searching and because
of his own necessities and sufferings he has discovered a few
things--how few, as contrasted with the vast sea of the all but
undiscoverable, not even the wisest can guess. And, even so, it is all a
process of inclusion, and hence exclusion. How little included? And how
much excluded? And Her secrecy is by no means moral or ethical or
generous in any way. Yet, confronted by all the iron and pagan mysteries
of a catch-as-catch-can world, and seeing daily and hourly that only the
strong or shrewd or gifted, or those befriended by them, survive, and
the weak and untalented are left to fester in want, and that only a
rather loose and not very protective or comforting balance or equation
is struck between extremes of any kind (even between his so-called God
and devil), man still persists in interpreting his needs or hopes or
dreams as the result of a super-tender administration of some kind, and
sniffs rather disconsolately, if not quite unbelievingly, at the hard
facts by which he is confronted. He is so anxious to think Nature kind,
generous, non-secret. Indeed, any well-reared-and-ordered moralist or
religionist would be inclined to contend, I am sure, that the world is
not in the main secret, or at least not maliciously so, and that, even
if it is, it should not be--innate desire for balance and equation
between so-called evil and good always urging him to this conclusion.
But, Nature is secret, quite maliciously so at times, and Her secrecy is
not to be escaped, even by those most anxious to condemn that phase of
Her character. All of us, as a part of Her, reflect this chiefest
characteristic as well as the most powerful instinct implanted in us by
Her--namely, the desire to preserve ourselves and propagate our kind as
against the lives and interests of all others. And, being confronted
also by one of Her sternest regulations, that only the shrewd, the
cunning, the appropriate or desired or presently essential or fit shall
survive when assailed by millions of other creatures not so fortunately
equipped, we are compelled to admit that we are at least a part of a
more or less internecine struggle and so do our best, willy-nilly, as
time and occasion may warrant or suggest to escape via secrecy,
intrigue, cunning and the like. In other words, we are compelled to
conceal that which is important to us and possibly inimical to others,
showing, in times of stress, only that which will help us; hence, we,
along with everything else, are compelled to be secret whether we wish
to or not.
It may be mentioned here that there is a certain fish whose scientific
name is Mycteroperca Bonaci and whose common name is Black Grouper,
which is of considerable value in this connection. It is a healthy
creature, growing to a weight of two hundred and fifty pounds and living
a comfortable existence because of its very remarkable ability to adapt
itself to conditions. Now while that very subtle thing which we call the
creative power and which we endow with the spirit of the Beatitudes is
supposed to build this mortal life in such fashion that only honesty and
virtue shall prevail, still it builds this fish. Moving in its dark
world of green waters, Mycteroperca has the very essence of secrecy,
the power of almost instantaneous change into something quite different
in so far as appearances are concerned. Its great superiority over other
fishes lies in an almost unbelievable power of simulation, which relates
solely to the pigmentation of its skin. In electrical mechanics we pride
ourselves on our ability to make over one brilliant scene into another
in the twinkling of an eye and flash picture after picture before the
onlooker. The directive control of Mycteroperca over its appearance is
so wonderful that you cannot look at it long without feeling that you
are witnessing something spectral and unnatural, so brilliant is its
power to deceive. Lying at the bottom of a bay, it can simulate the mud
by which it is surrounded. Hidden in the folds of glorious leaves, it is
of the same markings. Lurking in a flaw of light, it is like the light
itself shining dimly in water. Its power to elude or strike unseen is of
the greatest. One might go far afield and gather less forceful
indictments--the horrific spider spinning his trap for the unthinking
fly; the lovely Drosera (Sundew) using its crimson calyx for a
smothering-pit in which to seal and devour the victim of its beauty; the
rainbow-colored jellyfish that spreads its prismed tentacles like
streamers of great beauty, only to sting and torture all that falls
within their radiant folds. Man himself is busy digging the pit and
fashioning the snare, but he will not believe it. His feet are in the
trap of circumstances; his eyes are on an illusion.
But what would you say was the intention of the overruling intelligent,
constructive force which gives to Mycteroperca this ability? To fit it
to be truthful? Or would you say that subtlety, chicanery, trickery were
here at work? An implement of illusion one might readily suspect it to
be, a living lie, a creature whose business it is to appear what it is
not, to simulate that with which it has nothing in common, the power of
its enemies to forfend against which is little. The indictment is fair.
Yet is it not ridiculous that where all Nature is working in shadow,
each thing hiding from the other its processes or thoughts of power and
its intentions, that we ask of poor, spindling, cowardly, scurrying man,
dodging perpetually here and there between the giant legs of chance and,
in so far as he is concerned, all but malign forces, that he stand up
and speak _the truth_ in all things (would that he could discover it!)
or that he say boldly and on all occasions what is in his heart, what
are his intentions? Of old we know that men do not, anywhere, save in
consonance with their interests, and yet the silly, self-interested
request persists; a demonstration of how thought or observation and
deduction and principally self-interest lag behind fact. The only thing
which opposes secrecy and brings it to light is the skill for secrecy in
others; another illustration of the law of balance or equation in
Nature, the necessity of give and take in life, the desire of the other
person to be protected from too much secrecy on the part of others. But
the folly of the appeal in its ideal form, the charm that would
disappear with the arrival of absolute frankness, the mystery that would
go!
Ninety-nine and ninety-nine one-hundredths of all the interest or charm
of all the creatures of the earth and of the circumstances and spaces
and conditions in which they find themselves, is the secrecy--or, what
is the same, the mystery or subtlety--which attaches to them. We do not
know them; we do not understand them; we wonder at their states, their
thoughts, their moods, what they will do, which way turn, when
attacked, whom attack, whom deceive, whom praise, whom reward.
Secrecy--secrecy--mystery. If it were gone the illusion of life itself,
which is all that it is, would be gone also. And we are cautioned to
love truth and to say truly and to our own hurt if necessary! And some
advocate this so earnestly as part of the service due the other person,
or of life to us. Yet, in the main, it comes to this: every other is to
speak the truth to _us_, to conceal no important fact that might be
helpful to us from _us_, to do justice to _us_, to think kindly of _us_.
A fine program, and absolutely consonant with our desire to live,
prosper, succeed, regardless of the well-being of every other.
But let us reverse the program and advocate to ourselves, even in jest,
that we do strict justice (if we could discover what that might be) to
every other or tell him the exact truth about ourselves (heaven
forbid!), our adventures, dreams, schemes; to think kindly (yes, even to
think kindly in the face of the little that we know) of him. The
Catholic hierarchy--which, by the way, has little to do with Messianic
Christianity and its fine-spun ideals--so thoroughly understood human
nature of the middle centuries as well as to-day that it introduced as
an intermediary between man and his own conscience, his private shames,
regrets, fears: the confessional (secrecy) in order that the average
individual might free his soul of crimes without exposing himself to the
fierce light of criticism which a public confession or truth-telling
would entail. And the hesitation and even shame, for all its cloak of
secrecy, with which the confessional is approached! The Church knew that
man was not equal to the task of confronting his own accusing conscience
in the open or before others but must confess in secret, if at all.
Hence the drawn curtain and the reward of absolution for confession!
War, in the main the result of economic pressure, is an illustration of
the necessity for secrecy, or rather the methods by which war is
made--strategy, no less. Mere brute numbers clouting each other to
obtain a numerical supremacy is nothing. A soldier worthy the rank of
corporal would smile at such a program. Secrecy is the thing, the
devising of traps and lures whereby the enemy may be betrayed and to his
undoing. The spider weaving his net, the trapper devising his traps, the
snake moving in grasses the color of itself, is no different to the
general who by strategy (and what general without strategy is worthy
the name?) seeks to encompass the enemy. Shakespeare in Macbeth, by
means of the witches, suggests so archly the value of secrecy to the
so-called good or just (in that instance MacDuff) in fighting evil
(Macbeth) by having the soldiery of MacDuff simulate Birnam Wood by
cutting off and carrying the branches of its trees towards his castle,
thus lyingly fulfilling the prophecy of the witches to Macbeth that he
should not be injured until Birnam Wood should rise and come against
him, and so destroying his self-confidence. And, indeed, is not stark,
threatening secrecy, non-moral force that it is, the thing which gives
color if not joy to life and which lends surprise, uncertainty, fear and
hence freedom from ennui to life, and, by contrast, hope and
calculation, the greatest and most charming of all our gifts? For what
game or sport, implying, as they do, friendly contest, would be worthy
the name if it did not involve the element of chance or uncertainty, or,
in other words, secrecy, to the extent that one cannot beforehand
determine the outcome?
Again, are not all of our ambitions, if not as to their purport at least
as to their outcome, secret? Nature provides secrecy, or uncertainty,
which is the same thing, or darkness as a condition for the development
of quite everything, from seeds to human plans, and builds and builds
with us in countless ways and to astonishing results, and yet we are not
permitted to share Her secret. Our petty brains and bodies are but mere
implements of sorts in Her hands whereby She is constructing something,
the significance or purpose of which we cannot even guess and which She
is at no pains to reveal. She builds us to contain, or rather to
comprehend, but a modicum, a minute fragment, of the enormous
information or secret which is Hers. Secrecy on Her part, you see.
If one turns to the pages of science, what a masterly array of natural
diplomacy and artifice is there displayed! The fishes of the sea
imitating the coloring of the grasses or shadows of the deep in which
they hide and by means of which they escape their enemies (protective
coloring is the scientific name); insects the same, in so far as foliage
and grasses are concerned; birds the same; reptiles the same; man, for
all his noble theories and dreams of a generous and unselfish mode of
conduct, the same; as artificial and secretive as any, he. The stripling
lawyer imitates the look and manner of his intellectual superior--words,
phrases, carriage, side-whiskers even--in order to seem his equal, or in
other words to conceal (secrecy, you see) the fact that he is not his
equal, from some trusting and unsophisticated client. Protective
coloring, as it were.
Take again the instance of a man beginning to rise financially and
wishing to appear the equivalent of men far richer than himself. His
office is in their vicinity, his residence in their neighborhood. He is
in their club if possible, their church, their directories. He is not as
rich as they are, but wishes to conceal the fact. It is not good for the
world to know that he is not what he is not. His few public deeds would
not be as acceptable or he would be compelled to doff the uniform he so
much desires to wear, the manners, along possibly with the emoluments
thereof, or the hope of them. Secrecy--secrecy--secrecy. A seeming only,
where reality would leave life bare and hard.
And is it not the same with doctors, merchants, professionals of all
kinds? To this day is not medicine, like most other professions, fond of
mystery and secrecy.... Latin for instance, in preparing its
prescriptions, thereby giving them an air of superiority which is not
necessarily there at all, or to prevent the patient from knowing what is
being put into his stomach, or to make the cure seem more formidable by
being mysterious or secret. And to this hour, lawyers delighting in
magnificently darksome briefs, which in simple language would be
understandable to all and far less fearsome. Again, religion, the
Catholic and many other versions, rejoicing in a ritual which, if
presented or sung in English, would be just as impressive to the really
intelligent if it possessed any genuine merit or appeal. But to the
ignorant laity, according to the thoughts of the churchman, it might not
be; hence the Latin. And perhaps it is as it should be, for do not the
ignorant and the savage invariably crave that which they cannot
understand? It may be that they desire something more symbolic of all
they feel but cannot express, a quantity and quality of mysterious inner
moods and emotions which no human spoken words, especially those of
their own tongue, would even suggest.
Hence the priest and preacher, Shi’ite or Sunnite, Dervish, Buddhist, or
Brahman formalist, one and all, although ordinary human beings like
ourselves, are trained, and most carefully, in the protective coloring
of their profession. For essentially they are no different, or, with
very rare exception, no more spiritual, no more self-sacrificial--in
other words, no more unnatural--than any of their fellows. But, in due
process of time, the manners, customs, rules even of those who by chance
or peradventure (the accident of disposition or revulsion from too much
of something else) have been tender, self-sacrificial, humanitarian,
have given these latter their cue. They now know, let us say, what
“good” or self-restraining or humanity-loving men and women in times
past have, at one time and another, been like, how they walked in
humility, denied themselves the pleasures, even the necessities of life,
divided a cloak with a beggar or gave it whole, went with an importunate
enemy two miles instead of one, turned the other cheek to one who had
smitten them on one, gave the last of money or food to one who was
hungered, shelter to the shelterless, warmth to the cold, ignored
frivolity or laughter because of so much existing misery. And so those
who, without performing similar discomforting services, would like to
appear thus, now know what to do, how such an one, assuming that he
minister to the weak, the erring, the deficient, should conduct himself,
his most appropriate airs, manners, moods. Hence--but does one need to
call attention to the vast system of protective coloring which now
produces saviors, samaritans, ministers by the hundreds of thousands
throughout the world, all presumably embracing the qualities which make
the self-sacrificial character important, if it is important, yet who
perform few if any of those deeds which the coloring implies: the
“cloth,” the hats, the reversed collars, the severe _black_, sign of
abstemiousness, self-sacrifice, putting aside of the vanities, shows and
pleasures of this world.
Of course there is always the rare individual born so strong, so wise,
so courageous, that he needs few if any disguises in order to make life
palatable to him, or his way in it. But he is rare, and, even when
present, may not always proceed with ease or fearlessly but must
disguise the courage and intelligence which he possesses (secrecy). Even
he, when dealing with weaker, as well as stronger, individuals and
groups, dare not show forth his true strength, save in their behalf,
unless he would evoke their destroying anger. For masses, lacking power
as to their individual units, are infuriated by one who is not so
constituted, who offends by his strength their own futility. All lesser
strengths, whether represented by individuals or masses, are envious and
jealous of power. And the strong hate the strong quite as much as they
do the weak when the latter are opposed to them. And, vice versa, the
weak look upon the strong as driving masters, but the strong look upon
the strong as rivals seeking power equal to their own, or equal to the
task of displacing them. Hence their bitter and destructive rage; the
hate of tiger for tiger, for instance, bull for bull. Secrecy, secrecy,
here as elsewhere apparently the best policy Nature has been able to
devise the only or the essential one, the one most employed. Truly the
wise, however powerful, disguise their power and wisdom. They go softly,
speak kindly, advocate justice or equation in all things, as well they
may, seeing that they themselves may stand in need of it at any turn;
and, if they work their will, work it in the dark and alone as much as
possible.
What, then, shall we say of life when confronted by truths such as
these--that it is offensive, unbearable, a thing to be wept over,
shunned, departed from as quickly as possible? I think not. Nature has
always been so, and men for millions of years have undertaken life with
all its difficulties and subtleties and have done well enough. Indeed,
they have thrived, like all those who sharpen their souls against
difficulty. It is Nature’s way. With steel She cuts steel, with subtlety
subtlety, and the whole process appears to be one in which a more
capable device for enduring the inherent restlessness and changefulness
of Nature Herself is steadily prepared. It is one of dull wit upon whom,
like barnacles, illusions fasten. And he is in error who assumes that
the processes of Nature are different from those of man. We are like
life, like the chemicals and forces of which we are composed, and have
always been so. Only theory and dogma, growing upon and obscuring
sluggish minds, have permitted the rise of a contra-conception. We
should brush the cobwebs from our eyes and do away with illusion. In so
far as possible, and as did the gladiators of old, we should face life
with such weapons as we may, some with raw strength and short sword and
shield, others with net and trident; one relying on brute strength if
need must, the other on the skill and craft with which he may enmesh and
slay. There is no other way. Life is so, and only the cowardly or the
dull or the weak will either fail to see or endeavor to evade so solemn
and even terrible a truth.
IDEALS, MORALS, AND THE DAILY NEWSPAPER
For two centuries now if not longer the newspapers, rather than the
preachers and reformers generally who preceded and still parallel them,
have been elevating themselves to the rôles of soothsayer, prophet, and
guardians of all phases of virtue, honesty and the like, to say nothing
of those shibboleths of the would-be intellectually dominant, “justice”
and “truth.” And the particular views of these papers have come to have
an undue weight with those so moderately equipped intellectually as to
look upon them as moral leaders. Experiments in government and phases of
moral self-control, public and private, are there constantly advocated
for the good of the other man, yet nearly always in accordance with the
current bias or the direction of the interests of the paper. Yet back of
these papers, and in spite of a public following which is supposed to
regulate or control or suggest their policy and viewpoint, is always, or
nearly so, an individual or group of individuals, possibly a
self-interested organization (commercial, religious or otherwise) with
perhaps no more intellectual grip on the social and spiritual
complexities of the world than any other individual of average capacity
and judgment, possibly not so much. Yet with the tremendous leverage of
circulation, plus a serviceable and profitable and aggressive
counting-room to help out, their moral and social pronunciamentos
ridiculously enough become all but sacrosanct, irrefutable, colossal!
Yet after all is said and done, here is nothing more than an individual,
all too human perhaps, or if not that, a group represented by one
individual possibly, seeking via this same lever (circulation) the
special, particular things which he or it or they crave. And as a rule
he or his group is truckling and hand-rubbing to that which he or it or
they imagine the time requires, but seeking always circulation first, as
though that were the be-all and end-all of all value, wisdom and duty.
And yet, in America at least, where will you find a citizen who does not
to a marked extent reverence the opinions of his paper? The slavish
manner in which in certain regions to this day the voters follow a paper
and the manner in which the American press has successfully clouded
issue after issue since America began--the currency issue for one, the
slavery issue for another, the tariff issue for a third, the trust issue
for a fourth, the profiteering and European war issues at the present
moment. And where will you find a newspaper not advertising passing
panaceas that it knows cannot heal (I am not talking about patent
medicines), or admitting that a satisfactory social solution for the
woes of the millions cannot be found, or admitting frankly that human
law is the widespread net that it is, through which great and small
alike skip briskly, chance and accident restraining some and releasing
others? Only when the big skip through the lesion is greater. Or where
will you find a newspaper that will freely admit that the Ten
Commandments are not after all God-given law (do not think for a moment
that they privately believe they are), or that they constitute anything
more than a form of social agreement based for their validity on the
will of the majority and not holding where men do not believe them to be
true and not followed by any spiritually destructive consequences where
men do not accept them to be spiritually true? Life pours through the
reportorial, editorial and counting-rooms of the average newspaper
pell-mell quite as it does elsewhere, only a little more so. Those at
the head note well the secrecy, the self-interest, the “policy” running
through all things, the struggles of all individuals and organizations
to grow, usually at the expense of everything else; yet editorially, and
at the very best, a balance or dependent equation between rival
clashing interests--rival, hungry, self-seeking hordes--is all that is
ever struck here, although this is all but invariably announced as the
Sinaitic command of an all-wise, omnipotent, omnipresent intelligence,
the newspaper editor or owner posing as its especial mouthpiece and
forwarder! Is it not too ridiculous that so human and fallible or greedy
and venal a thing as the average newspaper should set itself up to be a
moral and at times even a religious arbiter of a community?
Yet where would be the circulation of the average paper if it did not so
do? And where would it be if it attempted to practice what it preached,
literally and for itself, as it so freely advises others to do? As all
those well know who have anything to do with the organization or control
of anything in life, newspapers included, the Beatitudes, as Christ laid
them down in the Sermon on the Mount, are not workable and never have
been practically. Yet where will you find a newspaper honestly so
stating, or even whispering a serious doubt? On the contrary, is it not
the absolute workability of these that has, hitherto at least, been most
violently insisted upon, and by organizations which well know the pagan
complexities of life and are in no way representative of even the
faintest approach toward a beatific conception of anything? “Do not as I
do but as I say.” That only quiescence and decay could follow the
enforcement of any such program as the Beatitudes or the fixed rules of
justice, truth, etc., advocated by the average daily paper or any one
else, is not only scientifically demonstrable by chemistry and physics
but is a truism to the average, and even less than average, constructive
and even newspaper mind. Nearly every one with any claim to intelligence
or experience understands this, yet where will you find a newspaper or
any other public medium of expression venturing on this simple truth?
The average man is still in leading strings to various silly theories,
religious or otherwise, fostered by self-interested groups, or to his
hope of temporary human prosperity, and these are the things which
still keep him in the wake of various sophisticated journals which
cunningly play upon his illusions. Indeed he flees exact fact as though
it were the plague. Blessed words or the sweet milk of romance and
prevarication are the things which entertain and soothe him most. In
other words--think of this ridiculous and paradoxical fact!--a creature
invents a bugaboo and then kneels down and worships it. It forges chains
for its so-called intellect, and then groans or rests content under
their binding weight.
But (to continue this slight diatribe) imagine the staff of any
newspaper even attempting to follow any rules save those which govern
the survival of the fit, or failing to cast the Beatitudes out of doors
when it comes to their special interests or the prosperity of the
several functions which they perform! Editorially the Beatitudes prove
profitable as texts for moral preachment and mass consumption, but in
the counting-office or the gathering of news how different! And as for
going two miles with a traveler when he had compelled you to go one, or
turning the other cheek when the first had been smitten! These things do
not fall within the realm of the practical and are therefore not in the
purview of any newspaper organization except in the editorial or
pulpiteering department, and that intended to catch the pennies of the
religionists.
So daily we have the spectacle of pages that in one column misrepresent
the motives of the social or political enemies of this or that
particular newspaper organization, or that play up to the subtleties of
vice or crime for their news or dramatic values, or that display to the
eyes of the young and old alike all the misadventures and incalculable
subterfuges of a treacherous universe, while in another column,
constantly reiterated, appear the words right, justice, mercy, truth,
tenderness, duty, etc., as representing a definite program for conduct
for the other person always, easily followed and easily achieved--by
him. Yes, for the other person, outside of any given newspaper office,
there are always God-given and immutable rules which spell peace and
happiness for him, that are invariably to be practiced, if you will
believe these same papers, by the majority, especially of their readers.
And indeed these rules are by them persistently represented as the will
and thought of a definite, definable God--He who spoke from Sinai, or
who walked to Calvary (quite different Gods, by the way!)--to fly in the
face of whom or which leads only to destruction. Yet all that is needed,
as they well know, in so far as a reasonable guide to conduct is
concerned (and all that we ever get, whether via the law or the average
motivating impulses of man) is the perception and the fact of the
necessity for a certain equation or balance in all things, i. e., the
Golden Rule, mystic heavens or hells and the clerical representatives of
the same with their collections and false notions to the contrary
notwithstanding. Yet where will you find a newspaper with sufficient
courage to say so? Where? Is it not here that one should pause and
inquire whether the newspapers, aside from their purely reportorial
functions (which latter might well be viséd under stricter libel,
perjury and false witness laws than those prevailing at present), should
receive so much as even a moment’s serious consideration?
EQUATION INEVITABLE A VARIANT IN PHILOSOPHIC VIEWPOINT
In society, where man is constantly scheming out methods of procedure
and how his ideas and feelings and appetites can be brought to a
harmonious workable state, a certain reciprocating smoothness of
exchange and balance must be, and apparently has been, achieved. It is
like those constructive adjustments which make any machine possible, and
has apparently given rise to such conceptions of the necessary
conditions for exchange as are indicated by the words “harmony,”
“justice,” “truth,” possibly even “tenderness” and “mercy,” all of which
mean but one thing, if they mean anything at all: the need of striking a
balance or achieving an equilibrium between plainly restless and
conflicting elements. (Why restless? Who knows? Why conflicting? Who
knows?) However, it is this same equation or balance which conditions so
large a thing as a universe, whose prime impulse apparently is to
achieve endless variety in homogeneity, and vice versa.
But these have been assumed, in an absolute and not a relative sense, to
be attributes of a Supreme Being who is all-just, all-truthful,
all-merciful, all-tender, rather than as mechanic or, if one accepts the
created theory of life, as an intelligently and yet not moralistically
worked-out system of minor arrangements, reciprocations and minute
equations, which have little to do with the aspects and movements of
much larger forces of which as yet we know nothing and which at first
glance hinder rather than aid the intellect in perceiving the ultimate
possibilities of the governing force in any direction. Indeed the rough
balance or equation everywhere seen and struck between element and
element, impulse and impulse, need and need, while they might seem to
lend color to the existence of absolute right, justice, truth, honor,
etc., really indicates nothing more than this rough approximation to
equation in everything--force with matter, element with element--as an
offset to incomprehensible and, to mortal mind, even horrible and
ghastly extremes and disorder; nothing more. For in the face of all the
schemes and contrivances whereby man may live in harmony with his
neighbor there is the contrary fact that all these schemes are
constantly being interfered with by contrary forces, decays, mistaken
notions, dreams which produce inharmony. This can mean nothing if not an
inherent impulse in Nature that makes for change and so rearrangement,
regardless of any existing harmonies or balances, plus the curious
impulse in man and Nature (inertia?) which seems to wish to avoid
change.
In spite of all man’s laws, taboos, social understandings, agreements
and beliefs, there are certain things done under the sun which do not
make for perpetual peace, harmony, order, exact justice and so the
welfare of the race _as he conceives it_; nor do they argue for the
domination of a harmonious, all-powerful God _as man conceives Him_.
Shocking as it may seem, certain individuals and groups contrive to live
and thrive under conditions which, according to other masses and
individuals who live and contemplate them, are apparently inimical to
the so-called best interests of the race and the plans of its Creator.
Indeed the latter is constantly, according to man or his theorists,
trying to overcome them and so save Himself.
Who and what are these inimical forces which are supposed to defy God
Himself? Criminals, liars, lechers, murderers, self-aggrandizing
intellects of all types and sizes, plus accident, disease, cataclysm. At
the same time and as if working in harmony with them, and to the dismay
of the religionist at least, there are vast legions of inimical
non-moral and seemingly socially non-helpful or even destructive
microbes and animals which seize on man, the image of God, whose
welfare God seeks, and which live and thrive without sign of
consciousness of God, equation, or anything else. I am thinking of the
germs of cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, as well as plagues of locusts,
worms, wood-lice or scales, rats and the like, which while destroying
vegetation and wealth most necessary to man at one point at the same
time may and do nourish birds inimical or helpful to him and cause all
things to develop methods of defending themselves and so aid their
growth. The chemic or mechanistic interpreter of life discovers equation
here well enough, and even a kind of rough harmony, although the
religionist does not, and so while it is entirely possible for a
monistic or evolutionary mystic to believe in a series of individually
severe but racially helpful checks and balances which in some of their
aspects are non-moral but are still driving man on to something, good or
ill, it is not possible for the religionist or the moralist, taking him
at his own dogmatic valuation, so to do. God must be good, exactly just,
always merciful, as man understands those things in the realm in which
he moves. Though a world of scientific data may now be brought forward
to demonstrate that God is not a personality with a given moral
direction or bias, as we understand morals, or with a here decipherable
purpose, yet he must deny that. The nature of God, if not revealed by a
voice of thunder from a mountain top, is, according to him, seen in the
works of Nature; and the works of Nature are good.
But if God, or Good, is imminent, working for some far-off, Divine
event, why the intermediate pother? I wonder at times why those who
ponder these things with a view of “saving” the race and so eventually
establishing truth, justice, mercy here on earth, are not permanently
confused or hushed into silence by the overwhelming evidence that no one
thing, however put together by the human brain to endure, succeeds
ultimately in maintaining itself or that which it dreams it will
maintain. Religions come and go. Laws are written and fade away. Moral
laws change with groups and climates. There remains only this necessity
for equation, some form of adjustment, reciprocity, balance between the
integral factors of each group, good, bad or indifferent, which no one
thinks of translating as the _only omnipresent evidence of so-called
Divine Will_. Indeed, since it is not necessarily directly connected
with the welfare of the individual but is something to which,
willy-nilly, he must at least roughly adjust himself, however
successfully he may temporarily evade it, if he wishes to live, it has
come to be looked upon by him as the machinations of a devil who opposes
his God. In other words, dogmatic morals, as we understand these, have
been introduced, although these same, or our interpretation of what is
essential to the welfare of life, may not agree with the larger chemic
urge and the import of this compulsion of balance as Nature views or
uses the same.
It follows, then, that many things which we now consider essential to
our racial or spiritual development, especially those which are intended
to fit us for a purely mythical heaven, may not be essential at all.
Especially may this be true of the many taboos and so-called moral
social arrangements which we have established here to make comfortable
our little passing state and which, by a process of egoism and
self-interest, we ascribe to the will of God. Asceticism in morals, as
well as self-imposed deprivations of any kind intended to bring us into
conformity with the exact righteousness of Nature or God, may have
nothing to do with any Divine mandate or impulse whatsoever. The
investigations of the mechanists and the monists throw a very disturbing
light on Nature (Loeb; Crile; Snyder). Excess, we know--or its
equivalent, strain--is destructive to any organism, and the dogmatic
moralist may well caution against it. Yet does a Creator who creates by
billions and allows whole races, such as the American Indians, for
example, to disappear almost in a generation, care particularly whether
this, that or the other organism is broken down by this, that or the
other strain or excess? It may be that excess is entirely gratifying to
Him or It--like a shell maker pleased with the explosive power of his
shells. What is one man, one organism, one race of organisms, to a thing
that produces them by quintillions, age in and age out? So a
conditioning law of equation or balance which compels a rough
reciprocity between parts, all parts, may not remove the effects of or
the necessity for strain or excess in the relationship of some men or
some races, or all men and all races. War certainly indicates as much,
and all the plottings and struggles and injustices and deaths which are
concomitants if not essentials of all forms of progress. Again, what
_we_ might consider necessary in the way of equation or balance, and
what _Nature_ would, are two very different things. Our very finite
minds can see but finitely. So our seemingly necessary limitations on
individuals may be accidental and trivial and so detrimental to the
larger purposes of Nature, which must betimes sweep them away with huge
murderous wars or movements and so restore the changeful balance which
she must keep in ways different from the minor arrangements which spring
up here.
Even now Nature may be constructing individuals and forces which will
completely undo, or at least enlarge, our theories of individual
limitations and powers. We do not as yet know what Nature is seeking
through man, if anything--certainly not his immortality; there is no
evidence as to that--nor can we guess how she is seeking it. One thing
we do know: our impulses do not always accord with moral or religious
law, the so-called will of the Creator here on earth, and yet our
impulses are assuredly provided us by a Creator, if no more than the
mechanistic one of the chemists and physicists. We do not compound
ourselves. We cannot always by any means control the impulses of our
compounds. Only the warring, frustrating impulses of other compounds (or
individuals or forces, social opinion being a phase of them) do that for
us; hence we are not privileged to say that God, or the Creator, wishes
us to do thus and so. We can only say that changing conditions compel us
to or prevent us from doing thus and so. Nature may wish us to be
forceful in many strange ways in order that we may contest, bicker with
other things equally forceful in other ways (all created by Her) so that
out of the contest such as we see may come something which we can never
see. Who knows?
In other words, all we can say is that Nature has supplied us with
certain forces or chemic tendencies and responses, and has also provided
(rather roughly in certain instances) the checks and balances which
govern the same. Our puny strengths will permit us to do only so much;
no more. That these strengths are being enlarged from time to time is
rather obvious (consider a man like John D. Rockefeller, or Napoleon,
and an ape). At the same time the limitations essential to balance,
reciprocity, part with part and force with force, are apparently never
set aside entirely. Both Rockefeller and Napoleon find themselves
decidedly limited in their powers, compelled to compromise with many
things in moving to attain their dreams. And their wishes in the main
have far transcended the dictates of ethics, as these have hitherto been
conceived. For the most part they ignored reported or written ethics,
sticking by seemingly unethical forces, subtlety, craft, the power to do
all that their strength or their instincts permitted them to do. And
Nature appears to have no objection to them or their results, has
furthered them indeed, nor has She apparently to millions of creatures
like them in spirit, or worse, as we see _worse_ here, for She permits
their appearance and uses the result.
Let me vary the argument slightly.
The shelves of our law libraries are packed to suffocation and moldering
to decay with laws ethically intended to govern things which man has
never yet been able to govern entirely and probably never will be,
although the instinct so to legislate probably conforms to the
mechanistic instinct for balance and proportion in all things. In
England they hung men for sheep-stealing a few hundred years ago, and
yet sheep were and still are stolen in England. It is death to kill your
neighbor, and yet when did man ever cease killing his neighbor? Is it
not as often and as indifferently done to-day as ever? It means from one
to twenty years in the penitentiary in America to steal, and yet men
steal. It is written that one should never covet his neighbor’s wife and
that adultery is a crime, yet when has the ultimate conception of these
things been more than a dream? Man, or at least a part of him, a
fragment of the chemical whole of which he is a part or an expression,
wishes and writes laws to confirm these, but in spite of all so-called
spiritual instruction, an ordered scheme of spiritual rewards and
punishments, he is still not chemically able to accommodate himself to
these things--not all of him, at least. Nature, his sheer, rank human
nature, which sinks deep below into mechanistic, chemical and physical
laws and substances, will not let him. Instead he resorts to subtlety,
craft--a very unspiritual but plainly natural or chemical thing. The
fact is that the power of certain individuals to do is only limited by
the power of certain other individuals to resist, and their natures and
tendencies are by no means the same. Yet this squares with the first or
pyknotic law of energy, as laid down by Vogt.[A] The self-integrating
force of one individual is limited by the self-integrating force of all
other individuals; which is, if it is anything, Newton’s law working out
in human affairs. There is a rough law of balance indicated by this
opposition and strain, but nothing more.
I once talked with a discouraged, or let us say pessimistic,
humanitarian, the twenty best years of whose life had been devoted to
corrective and ameliorative work among dependents and defectives, young
and old, criminals, the physically undermined and the insane. This man
had worked to have various laws passed in various States which would
tend to lessen the brutality of their treatment and also to bring about
some method whereby their self-reproduction would be painlessly stopped.
His idea, after twenty years of experimenting, was that the processes by
which the criminal and defectives generally were being gathered and
governed and improved, however laudable in theory, was destined to
eventually prove economically impossible and so shirked. The tares were
too many, too elusive, too expensive to gather and govern. “The thing
can’t be done,” I remember his saying. “As society is at present
governed or constituted something which is by no means humanitarian or
ideal prevails, and in spite of the best intentions of idealists or
philanthropists you have the enormous toll of inefficiency and nepotism
to contend with. Always the old Adam breaks loose somewhere, and by the
time you have investigated and reinvestigated and built institutions and
passed laws and elected officials the thing becomes a social and
financial burden beyond reckoning--lost,” he added, “in abstrusities and
bad management. Politicians juggle with it, and newer reformers or
reactionaries undo what you have done. Besides,” he concluded, “normal,
healthy men and women do not appear to be able to concern themselves
with the day-to-day variations and aberrations of dependent defectives
and criminal types. You have the spectacle then of official and even
medical neglect, brutality, rotten meat being served to criminals or
those detained or cared for--in short, all the horrors that spring from
some curious opposition in Nature to anything which is not able to take
care of itself. Her plan apparently is to let them die. I tell you that
the law of the survival of the strongest cannot be set aside. Any
attempt to do so merely begets a vast tangle of effort and expense which
results in the final operation of that law anyhow.”
My own observations of the working of various plans and theories
calculated to improve or “save” mankind coincide with this and suggest
to me the conclusion that there is, on the one hand, inherent in the
chemic impulses and appetites of life (which man does not create), an
instinct toward individuality which may be for good or for ill, plus, on
the other hand, this law of balance or equation but over which neither
the humanitarian nor the idealist, any more than the criminal or
indifferent or self-seeking realist, has any control whatever. If this
were not true there would be no explaining such strange social
developments as the lusts of certain individuals, the vast animal
hungers and abnormalities which seem to contradict any possibility of an
exact social equation. While the ascetic passions and self-sacrifice of
such men as St. Francis, Jesus, Buddha and the like may belie an
entirely material or animal interpretation of this very material scene,
the more material one of an Alexander VI., a Medici, a Morgan and a
Gould do suggest that an equation or balance between the types is
holding in Nature. Men do fight and die for idealistic or moral beliefs
just as plainly as they do for material ends. This would indicate, as I
said before, a desire for rough balance or equilibrium in Nature between
the starkest extremes of its creative impulses--equation, equation.
Nothing more nor less.
But a God directing and calling?
Oh, no; not that necessarily, but a condition in Nature itself perhaps
which will not permit it to move save by a process of checks and
balances--variety in unity, and vice versa.
If one takes no more varied types than Christ and Nero, or Alexander VI.
and St. Francis, one sees how plain this is, in so far as our earthly
state is concerned. God, or Nature, or Life, permits both, creates both.
In these examples one sees how the impulses of the flesh always vary and
how difficult it is, where millions outrival these in secret tendencies
and impulses, to suggest a working harmony; and yet there is a harmony
and they do harmonize, or, by triturating the one the other maintain a
working balance, the tendencies of the one being offset by those of the
other, and vice versa.
No less latitude, perhaps, could or would serve in a world or a
universe which breeds individuals by quadrillions, momentarily perhaps,
and which conceals or contains forces of whose impulses, emotions,
necessities we know nothing, and so equation is and can be the only
answer. What can we know, for instance, of the impulses or morals of the
Sun, whose heat apparently breeds all forms of life we know here,
horrific and otherwise? And yet we also know that heat is balanced by
cold in the universe; light by no light; matter by force; tenderness by
savagery; lust by asceticism; love by hate; and so on _ad infinitum_. No
thing is fixed. All tendencies are permitted apparently. Only a balance
is maintained.
The thing which the evolutionist has discovered and put forward with
considerable enthusiasm is this: that life in every form has tended to
evolve from the simple to the complex, and only through a vast
complexity or organization has it managed to attain this spectacle of
things which we call life or beauty--division of itself, as it were. The
complexity of the individual thing which we call a tree or a flower or
an animal, or, if you please, a social state (and indeed those more or
less abstruse things which we know as arts and sciences), are but a
further evolution of the complexity of the world machine, and life has
brought them about and apparently saved them to the world, possibly for
the purpose of partial self-expression. At the same time there has
always been involved in this process the law of the survival of the
strongest or temporarily and accidentally most favored, a process which
the humanitarians are never prone to accept because it belies the theory
of saving anything except by a compensative condition of slaughter and
neglect of other things less strong--or, as the phrase has it, unfit
things. In the theory of the religionist and the moralist the horrific
processes that work in the sea and the jungle, and other unsocialized
and enigmatic phases of imminent life, are entirely outside the scheme
of a just and merciful God or Creator, not countenanced by Him! When His
will is known and His suggestions are obeyed, these will be overcome
and disappear! Well, this may be true, only it does not appear from any
material or mental examination of the scene.
Even now, as we talk of sweeter and less avid processes which might be
brought into play by a superior power, life is maintaining its ancient
balance of evil and good, or extremities of one kind balanced against
extremities of another. Even now, under the very noses of the
religionists and the moralists, these processes are at work and show no
sign of being abated. For every neighborhood of taste and comfort,
witness the vast areas of poverty, poor taste, neglect, dull thought,
inefficiency. For every comfortable man a lean one, or many. For every
mind of the first order a million of a weaker, fumbling character. For
every tender, Christ-like soul how many of another kind--avid, selfish,
cruel, hideous almost! Are the poor governed by the rich--and well? Do
the shrewd rule the ignorant, and to their advantage? Do the strong
control the weak, and to their advantage? Are the inefficient well or
badly housed, well or badly nourished, neglected, left to stew in their
own juice of misery and live and die as best they can, or are they
looked after, as the religionist and moralist suggest and hope for? Only
the dull or dishonest among the moralists and religionists can, it seems
to me, fail to perceive or dare deny what even the dull or the ignorant
now being trampled upon do already vaguely perceive and understand.
And yet behold! the song of ultimate perfection continues yearly, from
century to century, to be sung. The Divine, far-off event (which, if
anything, is Nirvana) is surely coming. A sweeter and less avid process
will be brought into play. Man is to be saved from hunger, cold, thirst,
lust, undue material ambition, by telling him how horrible they are and
asking him to be kind. Well, he may make a comfortable social
organization for himself here on earth, but that will by no means prove
that the universe or God is moral. For, behold--man himself is
superimposed upon other forms of life, a ruthless Lord or devil to
them, and thrives only by their destruction. Do you suppose the ox, the
hog, the horse, the fish, or any of the multitude of creatures man slays
or enslaves in order that he may be comfortable and spiritually at rest,
could be made to look upon him as tender, merciful, a creature
necessarily to be saved to a higher spiritual state--representing, for
instance, an all-kind God? I doubt it. What about the God who allows
their organization and so-called right to life to be disrupted in our
favor? Where the universal harmony, justice, mercy there? We are to
develop a social organization in which gentleness, mercy and harmony
will prevail among us, but we do not hesitate to curb the efforts or
aspirations of lesser creatures, even rival nations--the Indians,
say--in the same direction. In the great days to come no man will
contest with his neighbor, but only with the universe--which of course
raises the question of why fight the universe. And where do the rights
of the universe come in, which we are hoping to rob to our own advantage
and its enslavement?
Aside from the confusion involved as to the character of man and the
governing forces of life, there is no quarrel with a portion of this
theory. To a certain extent harmony, or a “dependent equation,” as
Spencer was pleased to term it, will always be attained between
individuals assembled in vast numbers on earth or in the sea perforce,
because it may not be escaped. If one reads chemistry and physics
correctly it is a condition which underlies everything. An equation
between matter and force and the elements to which apparently they give
rise, must be struck, a balance attained, if life as we see it is to
appear or go on. The slightest disturbance of the existing equations
which produce life as we see it, as Loeb and Crile and others have
shown, ends in monstrosities or confusion, and life as we know it
ceases. In our own social life, if equation did not hold, internecine
contest would soon decimate and gradually eliminate the vast majority of
us. The late great war indicated as much. Indeed there is scarcely any
doubt that social life as we know it will yet need to be organized upon
an even more closely balanced scale than at present, since the elements
and powers which make for contest and self-defense are becoming more
numerous. Hunger, cold, thirst and many other ills to which the flesh is
heir may yet be eliminated among men, or the individuals of one dominant
state. It is now, by certain orders of men and insects; the bee-hive and
the ant-colony offer suggestions. But it does not follow that the basic
elements of Nature or God, or man, would thereby be changed. Is it not
more likely that here and now, in a small way and for the time being,
only their disruptive as opposed to their constructive characteristics
are restrained? Such stabilized centers of motion do occur in Nature
from time to time in small ways and places. All human and animal bodies,
machines and forms of government even, are illustrations in point. But
does that prove or augur that the changeful elemental conditions
everywhere prevailing outside these delicate arrangements in Nature may
not eventually sweep in and make over that which has been established
here into such a condition as we find in the sea, for instance, where
life insistently and apparently mechanistically preys on life? Why not?
The glory of pagan life and art--were they saved? Or was their knell
sounded by the advent of Christianity?
Many, observing only the satisfactory results of harmony or equation or
balance, and entirely failing to note the essential disharmonies out of
which alone harmonies may take their rise, have assumed the existence of
an emasculate God whose virtues are all negative, ignoring the positive
horrors by which we live and progress. For them the cataclysms of
physics, the fumbling failures of biology, are meaningless, if they
exist at all. Yet plainly the creative force is neither as generous nor
as amiable as they think. Rather, brilliant as is all this evolutionary
process, and it reveals startling harmonies, beauties and seeming
intelligence, it still only argues some such fumbling hit-or-miss
mechanistic scheme as the chemists and physicists are beginning to
outline and which allows for far more latitude in morals and conduct, as
well as invention and discovery even, than the religionist has hitherto
been willing to grant. The only one who appears to sense the true
process or processes of Nature is the mechanistic chemist or physicist,
who does not deny the possibility of extremes and horrors existing in
the Divine mind or will of the creative impulse. “Murder,” say these
scientific seekers after truth, or at least their facts point to this,
“is a disturbing and disrupting process. It destroys the equation best
expressed in ‘Live and let live.’ It affects individual peace. If you do
so unto others they will do the same unto you. Chemically and
physically, according to the law of reaction or equation, they cannot
very well avoid it. Therefore do not murder.” Yet where is there any
Divine command in that? Is it not rather a simple and easily
understandable interpretation of a very obvious and inescapable law of
equation, under which nevertheless, so roughly is this law adjusted and
so casually does it work, murder and many other forms of non-equation
may and do take their rise and do persist? If that is God or Good, then
God permits murder, repays with murder, or asks you to be the judge as
to whether you will tolerate murder in your State. Rather, to the
physicist and chemist, it appears to be not so much a Divine command as
an accidental and inescapable condition of equation.
We are told, by way of dogmatic moral comfort, that man has achieved
somewhat that the animals have not, and that therefore he is superior.
But also, as is now becoming perfectly plain, he has been able to
discover and perpetuate for his own satisfaction crimes and iniquities
for which no animal apparently within its small range of instinct or
mechanistic control has the skill. Nature makes both, yet she does not,
or cannot, or at least has not, made the animals as delicately and
resourcefully evil in some things as is man. That is why he is able to
dominate them. In one way, then, man is worse than the animals, and in
another better--a balance presumably in the favor of man, though not
necessarily so. The truth is that most of the ways wherein man has been
differentiated from the animals by forces over which he has no control
concern not ethics, as we understand and act upon them, but mechanical
articulations and utilitarian comforts, the construction and normal use
of which lie entirely apart from the realm of ethics. There is nothing
either moral or immoral in the development and use or non-use of steam,
electricity, plumbing, the tractor engine, automobiles and so on. They
are mechanistic and non-moral. Thus we have developed architecture,
machinery and the arts. It is true that in so far as man himself is
concerned these are helpful to him in his mass phase and provide a
larger freedom, which has resulted in a large experience, hence
intelligence or comprehension in every direction. Yet have they improved
his morals? Or lowered them? Who would say so? Yet perceiving this
development or change, and, more faintly, the need of balance and
equation which runs through all and underlies all, man has set about the
task of writing about it, framing the inescapable equational laws which
all changes suggest and compel into definite unbreakable commands from a
definite God, singing songs about Him, painting pictures of Him, and
directing attention to what man has ignorantly assumed to be a universal
source of supply which will or should permit the greatest possible
number to live under some such scheme of equation as is here suggested.
Unfortunately this has not been proved as yet, and at any rate it is not
the same as the presumably provable scheme of moral order which has been
foisted upon man by the dull, designing or poetically enthusiastic of
all ages, and which involves the laying aside of nearly every forceful,
vigorous, natural, or human or pagan, attribute. Quite the contrary.
In this connection I should like to reiterate that to the Christian and
other metaphysical idealists neither dishonesty nor vice nor any crime
is contemplated by God, and therefore should not exist, any more than
any other variation from that perfect state, best indicated perhaps by
what the Ten Commandments forbid and the Beatitudes imply. God does not
will them. He personally resents and will punish their appearance. The
first part of this (i. e., that He does not will them) might be accepted
as true if the fact that he permits them, or at least that they _are_,
in spite of Him, not denied. But of course religion, as all those who
philosophically struggle with life now know or should, is an
abstraction, an ideal, whose dogmas can only in part be approximated in
life. For life, as we nearly all know by now or should, is a shifty and
evasive mechanism, chemic in part at least, and material and
inscrutable, with which the abstractions of the religionist have little
if anything in common. The best that religion and ethics have so far
done is to take credit for the inherent and necessary tendency to
compromise which has previously been indicated and which is manifested
by all phases of natural energy, as much by that shown in our body
politic as anywhere else. Indeed, the very best that religion can show
is no better than that which life, or Nature Herself, could and did long
before any religion appeared, namely, a rough equation, a balance
struck; so that if a man had done a consciously wrong thing in one place
he was chemically or emotionally moved to do a right thing in another,
and if his actions were bad in one way it might be that he was compelled
by forces outside his control to counterbalance them by good ones in
another. All animal forms above those merely mechanistic or tropic
(those governed by tropisms of various kinds) appear to display most of
the virtues exercised by humans--the care of their young, for instance,
distress at their loss, loyalty, ability to organize and so observe
group laws; characteristics celebrated by man, where exercised by him,
as virtues, beatitudes and what not else. Yet these lower forms cannot
possibly know of religious or moral precepts in any revealed or
instructed sense, via a Messiah or Redeemer. Instincts or tropisms as
developed and verified by oppositions or aids (accidental or
otherwise)--once more the law of balance or equation--appear to have
been their sole guides. Hence to the religionist and moralist, thus far
at least, they have been beyond the pale of ethical consideration,
things almost beyond the willing, and so beyond the care, of the Creator
Himself. An especial opponent of God or Good had to be devised in order
to take care of them. And yet are they not an excellent illustration of
this same creative and governing force in Nature which, while apparently
seeking variety in unity, is itself subject to a law of balance or
harmony as well as one of disharmony or change, and this without any
evidence self-conscious on its part? At least the investigations of the
chemists and the physicists thus far appear to indicate as much.
“Vengeance is mine” declared the old Hebraic Jahveh, and by that very
assertion he admitted that he did not expect to establish the
abstractions of right, truth, justice and mercy on earth but rather,
since he could not, he would at least attempt to strike a balance and
would exact, in the form of pain or disaster, repayment for things done
in opposition to his code.
Well, that requires no Sinaitic command or religious law to make it
true. It is not a matter for great churches and confessionals and pence
and genuflections--or is it? It is true, whether God or Moses or any one
else ever said so or not. It is a material and an economic fact as well
as a chemic or psychic law. If you wish to glorify God or Nature for
that, well and good. Your mood may be admirable or interesting, if not
exactly necessary. But certainly, whether one admits the existence of a
self-willing Creator or not, it is too much to say that man obtains
exact justice or that an exact return is made anywhere for energies
expended, ideals struggled for, efforts, good, bad or indifferent, made.
We know that is not true. Nor is it true that there is not a counter
impulse to withhold it. There is. And men, fellow-units in the great
self-balancing cosmos, all too frequently reflect that impulse. Man is
no more essentially just than he is unjust. He is an impulse, a will to
live, a sharply reflected chemical and physical impulse in Nature, which
acts or reacts as the nature of other chemical and physical stimuli in
immediate contact with him suggests or compels, and which same may be by
no means as moral as we think. Man, as a representation of chemical and
physical impulses coming from somewhere, has an innate desire for power
for extreme movement for himself; but so have all other mechanical or
physical representations of that impulse. And it is but the balancing
pressure of his fellows which keeps him in position at or near a median
line. If you examine him carefully you will find that in the main he
desires so-called “justice” for himself only, a fair balance for
himself, liberty for himself, or that which is related to him via
pleasure or profit, and so on _ad infinitum_. At the same time he is a
slave, a tool, a medium for something, an intruded if not
self-intruding, self-seeking insect, but without power to control or
fend against major impulses and powers. Still, between man and man,
tribe and tribe, nation and nation, there are these necessary equations
or balances plus their internal hopes or chemic tendencies, each one for
himself, to change and achieve; yet the same being but roughly worked
out; on the one hand to balance or equation in favor of all the others,
on the other hand to supremacy or extreme liberty of movement for each.
Where only failure is achieved there is either a lull, temporary only,
or a storm soon or late (revolution), or periods of horror in which
chaos rules, or peace in which nothing is achieved. The world is sad
over its inability to obtain freedom, great scope of emotion, for
itself, or gleeful because of its triumph in this direction. But all the
time it is struggling and maintaining but a rough and in the main brief
balance, part with part or unit with unit.
One might go on indefinitely contemplating other phases of this same
equational law, its relation to love of parents, love of country, love
of home, love of one’s neighbor, love of this, love of that. Are not all
of these held up as duties, virtues, perfections even Sinaitic commands,
as in “Honor thy father and thy mother,” when as a matter of fact and
inwardly we know that this is a matter of equation or balance and cannot
absolutely as a commandment from on high exist where no reasonable
return in kind is predicated. What, love a shameless, brutal, unparental
or non-filial father or mother, son or daughter, in whom, let us say,
exists not one redeeming trait or quality of all that we consider
essential to or characteristic of those states? It is not chemically
therefore not humanly possible. What is meant is that it is not only
possible but natural to make a reasonable return where affection,
kindness or care has been extended. Now while it is entirely conceivable
that one might love one who was cruel to oneself and generous to others,
or generous to oneself and cruel to others, who in some way or some one
direction fulfilled some phases of balance or equation, in however weak
or impossible a way, still one could not possibly love one who was in no
wise kind or generous to any one, a thing without reciprocal or
balancing relations in some direction. The law of balance or equation
which governs in all processes, even thought, will not permit it. There
must be something given in some way, directly or indirectly, before
anything can be returned or evolved, even in thought. And if one
reverses the picture and attempts to conceive of hating some one or
thing equationally just, fair or balanced, not attempting to take from
any one or thing too much and not withholding from any one or thing that
which is equationally his, it is quite as psychically impossible. One
cannot cerebrate inimically toward that person or thing as being evil,
reprehensible or what not. It cannot be done. Sometimes, where by reason
of plenty or inherent weakness of mind or force, or carelessness of
thought or interest, an individual is in any way indifferent to a
“reasonable” or balanced return to himself for effort made, labor given,
thought expended and what not, and where this results in no injury to
himself or others, it is entirely possible to look upon him with
indifference or as a fool, or as one who is weak-minded or not capable
of balancing himself against the shrewd and self-interested minds of
others. But such indifference or lack of self-interest would not
indicate that one looked upon him as being evil, scarcely even a
discreditable force, save possibly where his operations, or lack of
them, affected the interests or rights or privileges of another or
others.
Not love of God, then, it would seem, nor fear of God, although these
abstractions have come to be real enough to some minds, prevents one
individual from overriding the dreams and hopes of his neighbor, but
fear of retaliation which his selfishness might produce. “Thou shalt
not” springs plainly from “Thou hadst best not, it is dangerous,” to
which might be added the strangest quality of all, the tendency in large
or small bodies or masses to quiescence, the love of peace, or inertia.
Our evoluted mechanistic chemism has become so diffused or varied that
we may even now speak of such intangible and yet vital forces as love of
the fixed scene, which appears to be little more than a reflected form
of helio, or ego, or someother form of tropism, the inherent power in
everything to attract something to itself and so maintain itself, for
the time being anyhow. That things are inclined to a static or inert
state or to congeal and so stratify and endure in that form (Nirvana?)
is as true as that they must change; and, under certain conditions,
Nature seems to abhor too much speed, as too little.
Is there anywhere in this to be found that universal right, truth,
justice, mercy, as we have hitherto deemed it or them to be or exist?
Perhaps not, but it is all of so-called right, truth, mercy or justice,
universal or otherwise, that we will ever know, all of it that is
involved with life. Does this, by any chance, contain truth? Yes,
indeed, it is truth, for it is a fact. Is it right? Well, for life as we
find it conditioned it is apparently the only way. Who can suggest a
better? Should the fact that we find ourselves thus conditioned,
confronted by Nature in all Her complexity and with only this necessity
for equation to fall back on, disconcert or dishearten us? Need it or
must it take the savor out of life? No; not, at least, in my judgment.
Life in its most terrible as well as its most halcyon aspects is at once
an enticing and a fit game. It seems well enough suited to our
capacities, and we to it, since essentially we are of it--it, in fact.
At least it leaves or provides us much to strive for, and strife is the
only key to knowledge or sensation and life that we have. Abstractions
and theories are good as games at which the human mind may play if it
chooses, and whenever life becomes too severe for any group or part of
it it is easy enough to invent a theory or abstraction which will then
make it seem different. And this is almost invariably done, as witness
all the impossible religions and theories that at one time and another
have filled the world. Like chess or checkers, they furnish a diversion
or relief to life-weary minds. If you have nothing better to do even a
religion may be worth while. At worst it can only narrow your vision,
and if that is a comfort--well, it is a comfort, but you do not thus
escape the essential facts of life. You merely invent a shield against
their too-sharp blows. Regardless of whatever dogmatic moralities may
have been dreamed, or yet may be, or attempted, life is still avid,
treacherous, astounding. Our little safety, if we have any, lies not in
the desires or intentions of our fellow-mortals, good, bad or
indifferent, or in their churches or creeds, or ours really, but in
their limitations. _They dare not do unto us for fear of what we will do
to them, or of what the machinery of equation which life has set up or
is conditioned by and now operates, will do to them._ All else is a
poet’s dream.
What, then, shall man do? Weep for that? Shall he despair and call life
a failure and a torment? Shall he say that it is limited, that there is
no opportunity for progress, or that the sweetness of those things
defined as love, charity, mercy, neighborliness and race sociability are
by such a governing condition destroyed? Not at all. Wherein is the
temperament of Nature Herself, Her sweetness, if such there be; Her
romance, if such there be; Her beauty, if such there be, altered by
this? Life is as it is--active, dancing, changeful, beautiful, at once
brutal and tender--regardless of how our theories would seek to make it
seem, and though it does as it chooses at times, or appears to, and
invents or assumes various guises of perfection, it is as it has always
been, both good and bad, yet held in a kind of equational vise or
harmony--neither too good nor too bad--or we would not now be here at
all, any of us, to tell the tale. As it is, and well within its
equational swing or law, there is room for the will to superiority in
the super-man as well as the trembling fears of the least of created
creatures. Nor is it impossible for man, with his puny strength or with
such force as he may gather, to attempt to upset this very equation and
so rule all; or, on the contrary, choose to live in sweetest peace with
his neighbor, if he can. He may, and great will be the wonder and charm
of his existence if he no more than try. But that he should succeed in
permanently so doing is not within his scope unless he should grow to be
the universe itself. On the other hand, under this same controlling
equation, a man may be a Colossus and bestride the world without
upsetting the equation ultimately. Like Alexander, he may sigh for more
worlds to conquer; or, like Hannibal, take refuge in despair and death.
Or, better yet, like some forceful and yet humble laborer at some small
task, he may seek to hide himself away in some simple peaceful realm,
free of the storms which rock these greater worlds, and still be secure
in one of those minor equilibriums which in the shadow of some of the
greater ones are always holding somewhere in part. For, roughly,
equation is always holding in one or many forms--dependent equations,
which consist of many, many equations or balances, joined in some still
greater one or synthesis--and apparently always will. Who shall say? To
our present senses the ultimate facts of life are not altering;
although that is not for petty man to know.
On the other hand, I should say that the condition of equation which is
everywhere evident does not deny or belie any elements of softness,
color, beauty or art which now sweeten, or seem, to, a picture which
must seem to many inherently grim. God, Good, Nature, Force, is not now,
and never has been apparently, without some of these aspects in part,
nor bare of the easing limitations indicated by the Ten Commandments,
the Golden Rule and the Beatitudes. For before these were _it_ was, and
if they are or ever were true they still are so, for they took their
rise out of it and so must be and remain in it, forever and ever,
emanations or adjustments (equation, no doubt) suggested by the desire
for expression on the part of the cosmos as a whole. Yet the knowledge
that they are the result of a condition or equation which the universe,
the life force itself, cannot escape, is or should be most encouraging.
Nature must let many things live in reasonable equation or peace, for it
is in them and they in it. “I am in the Father; the Father is in me.”
If, then, man is savage he is also tender, inherently so apparently, for
by what measure would he measure savageness if not by its contrary? And
if he is avid, centripetal, individual, is he not somewhat of their
contrary also? In truth, somewhere in the scheme of things is implanted
a love of beauty and order as well as their contraries, which can only
find expression via equation, and this it is, chemical, inherent
awareness of it no doubt, which eases the ache of existence for us all
(God, man, devil). For if life loves change, movement, difference,
contest, it also plainly loves their contraries, for these exist, and we
could not know the one without the other. Order exists as a half of its
opposite, disorder, and the one could not well be without the other, and
peace exists, if at all, as the complement or antithesis of what is not
peaceful. Yet through all and all, and in all and all, are the sting and
gayety of change and the consciousness of it, and these remain,
possibly forever and ever, outside Nirvana, which Nature may never wish
to see or know. It may be impossible for Her to die or be still.
Equation, then, is that which is involved in the lust of the lover for
his sweetheart, and her acceptance; the husband for his wife, and her
faith; the mother for her child, and its love; the citizen for his
neighbor; the individual for his friend. Art, the love of life for
itself, is nothing more than a synthesis of many equations whereby many
lovely harmonies and their opposites are expressed or implied. Hunger,
balanced against satiation, creates more beauty. Life builds and wills
far beyond the ken of man or his companion animals, and all that he can
know is the chemic thrill of life, its joys, the necessity of equation
and so-called fair play, or rhythm and balance. For, behold, life is
ever dancing and does not will to be still. Not to want too much,
because one cannot get too much; not to seek to devour the whole world,
because one cannot; not to threaten, because of vanity and
self-appreciation, all else with extermination, because one cannot
possibly exterminate all else without disturbing the general balance and
so bring the weight, the conditioning and crushing force of equation
itself upon oneself, is to say what may offend the individual life-lover
but which nevertheless produces the only condition in which the general
totality in all its glittering variety, which it appears to crave, can
best express itself outside Nirvana. And this it is which should drive
the fog of religious theory out of our minds.
For why pray in beggarly fashion for that which will be, whether we pray
or not--which, as the mechanists believe and show cannot escape its own
destiny? Rather sing and be joyful, I should say, for one’s unescapable
share in so great a spectacle. The game is open, free, a thrashing,
glorious scene. Our God, if we have one, is not a namby-pamby,
milk-and-water solution, suitable for the stomachs and optics of still
more namby-pamby men, but a vast somewhat which offers a splendid
universe-eating career to the giant, if he wills, an opportunity to
thrive and grow to even the most spindling of beginners. Our God, if we
have one, is a vast somewhat too great for the perception or
understanding or destruction or solution of any minor portion of Him,
such as we are. He is a creator of spectacles, a slinger of
thunder-bolts, a breather of fire, a master of cataclysm. His, or Its,
least breath is storm. Its sigh is earthquake or orbital derangement. No
attributes such as man can conceive can apply--neither good nor evil,
virtue or its opposite--for these apply only as mild suggestions at
moments of equation in one minor part of the great whole or another. Our
God is tragedy and comedy, terror and delight. He is limitless
opportunity and endless opposition and destruction, for His way is
extremes in equation, and nothing more and nothing less.
What then? Despair over that? Is there not, in all conscience, under a
loose equation (loose and operative only in extremes) room for all the
lusts, the terrors, the wonders, the simplicities of the greatest as
well as the least? Alexander may yet be again, or the devil himself in
all his power and lurid glory, before he is crushed and set aside, for
the time being, by his inherent antithesis, the thing which is not
devil.
And as for the religionist, may not Jesus, St. Francis, St. Simon
Stylites come again? Let man fight for their return if he will. Who is
to gainsay him?--not God, Force, the Universal Substance. Obviously it
does not care how it expresses itself, so long as it achieves avid,
forceful, artistic expression.
PHANTASMAGORIA.
CHARACTERS:
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
BEAUTY
AMBITION
PITY
LOVE
HATE
DESPAIR
REASON
HOPE
FEAR
GREED
FIRST }
SECOND }
THIRD }
FOURTH } POWERS OF DARKNESS
FIFTH }
SIXTH }
SERAPHIM
CHERUBIM
_Clouds upon clouds of birds, snakes, fish, animals, men, flowers,
trees, planets, suns._
SCENE I--_The House of Birth_.
SCENE II--_The House of Life_.
SCENE III--_The House of Death_.
SCENE I. THE HOUSE OF BIRTH
SCENE: _Darkness and illimitable space. Æons of time, as measured
by the illusion of time, elapse._ THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE, _as
force, inert, yet all-in-all, rests quiescent. A faint pulsing
begins. Without thought or reason, restless, chaotic, the idea of
separateness and individuality generates--an insane dream. The
cloudy length of a giant outlines itself, reclining in endless
space. It appears and disappears, now a thigh, now an arm, only to
fade again. The vague outlines of a brow and cheek appear, only to
fade again. Æons of time elapse. The illusion reasserts itself.
Cloudy fire-mists pour from his nostrils. Poles of light erect
themselves from materialized temples. Blazing suns and meteors
burst forth and swirl about his head. Strange and multitudinous
forms manifest themselves--animals, birds, fishes, horned and
winged things. They appear and disappear, as thoughts form and
fade. He is blind, aged, insane. He erects imaginary titanic arms
and rubs his changing, stupendous face with his changing hands._
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
Oh, ho, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho, ho! (_He sinks back wearily, all but the
outlines of his head disappearing._)
BEAUTY (_a thought_)
(_Leaping, pink-limbed and perfect, from his brain, a figure of
delight._) Lord, thou hast created me! I am thy perfect thought, thy
happiest illusion! I will be worshiped! I will be worshiped! (_She
springs sinuously among the spinning, changing spheres, a radiant smile
upon her face, her arms tossed upward in delight._)
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Materializing himself fully, a paretic smile upon his lips. He rubs
his face and imagines eyes, giving himself sight, and surveys her
broodingly._) Have I created thee? Oh, ho, ho, ho! (_He rubs his
flaming hair._) I must not forget thee! I must not forget thee! Oh, ho,
ho! Thou art Beauty! (_His expression changes; an unimaginable weariness
settles upon his face, aged, æonic. He frowns and leers and partly
fades, re-establishing himself after a time. As he does so_, AMBITION,
_a sinister thought, club in hand and darkling and scowling, a figure of
terror, leaps from his eyes_.)
AMBITION
(_Brandishing his club._) I will be obeyed! I will be obeyed! Out of thy
terror, Lord, thou hast created me! War and strife will I have! War!
War! (_He struts and stares._)
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_The darkling mood passing, a light of momentary peace settling on his
face. He gazes at the figure tolerantly._) Have I created thee? Weary!
Weary! I am weary! (_He stretches his arms._) But stay! I am lonely. Be
thou what thou art. (_He draws himself to a sitting position, all the
height and depth of space._)
BEAUTY
(_Threading a necklace of suns._) I will be worshiped! I will be
worshiped! (_She croons joyously._)
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_His mood changing, a giant despair creeping into his eyes._) Forever
and ever! Oh, ho, ho, ho! Forever and ever! It is a dream! (_He staggers
to his feet, the great shadowy arms flailing wildly. As he does so he
imagines Space and Time, and begins to wander down their lengths,
staggering as he goes. From his brow leap_ HATE, DESPAIR, PITY, HOPE,
FEAR, _thoughts all, the last two with great round eyes and open mouths.
At the same time clouds upon clouds of unimaginable forms and
characters, previously non-existent, come into being, the product of his
fancy. Suns, worlds, fire-mists, swarms of birds, snakes, fishes,
animals and men are born, strange wraiths that float in wreaths about
him and traverse all immensity. They circle, murmur, mutter, cry. The
avatars of men come forth, huge forms of gas. They are preceded and
followed by vast clouds of thoughts of their own--ravening, embodied
fancies that bicker and contest. These immense companies and semblances
appear and disappear, as the primary figure thinks or loses memory of
what he has thought. He alternately laughs and groans, maundering._)
BEAUTY
(_Dancing on before._) I will be worshiped! I will be worshiped!
AMBITION
(_Gathering at his back vast clouds of restless, threatening figures
like himself._) I am his thought of strength! I am his thought of power.
I am his thought of rage! I am his thought of contest! Oh, ho, ho, ho!
Follow me! Follow me! See, we will sow destruction! We will spread
despair! We will slay! We will burn! Oh, ho, ho, ho!
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Wildly, his fancy flaming furiously._) Oh, ho, ho, ho! I am God! I am
that I am--all in all! I am my dream of myself! I will dream me dreams,
visions. These are my creations, all! (_He turns and surveys his endless
fancies of horror and delight._) Oh, ho, ho, ho! Come, Art! Come, Love!
Come, Hope! Come, Death! Dream as I dream! Create destiny, suffer! I am
God! I cannot die! Insane! Insane! Insane! Oh, ho, ho, ho! (_He shouts
in agony, then joy, then sobs, staggering as he does so, ending in a
gale of lunatic laughter._)
PITY
(_To_ LOVE, _hovering near_.) We are his children; and we can do
nothing?
LOVE
Nothing, save he think on us.
PITY
(_To_ HOPE.) Canst thou do nothing?
HOPE
Nothing, save he think on me and thee.
HATE
(_Clasping the hand of_ DESPAIR.) Come aside. Are not we his thought
also? What have we in common with them?
DESPAIR
(_Darkly._) Nothing! Nothing! Yet are we his thought also, but not of
them! No, no, no! He should sleep again! He should sleep!
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Staggering and writhing._) Oh, ho, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho, ho! I am God! I
dream me dreams! I build me endless wonders, endless pleasures, endless
horrors! Oh, ho, ho, ho! (_He staggers madly on._)
BEAUTY
Build thou me temples of beauty, Lord! I will be worshiped! I will be
worshiped!
AMBITION
Make thou me worlds and legions! Worlds! Worlds! And legions! I would
rule! I would slay! I would burn!
LOVE
Oh, but wilt thou make flowers and vast realms of quiet places, Lord? Or
but little valleys, if thou wilt? Make streams and pretty shelters! Give
not all to Ambition, Lord! Give not all to war!
HATE
(_Springing before his face._) Make thou me implements of terror! Create
thou me forms of horror, of evil! Spin thou me dark chains and darker
places! Make thou tortures of failure and regret, Lord--tortures!
Tortures! (_He glowers about him._)
PITY
Nay, Lord, let not all be of horror and hate! Think thou on me, Lord, of
sweet pity and tender things! Or, if thou canst not, think thou but of
ways that I may heal what Hate will destroy, what Ambition would crush.
Think thou thus, Lord! I am a thought of thine also!
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Wearily._) Oh, ho, ho, ho! (_He staggers on._)
FEAR
Lord, do thou protect me! Do thou conceal me! Forget me not, Lord!
Forget me not! I fear! I fear!
DESPAIR
Why dost thou not sleep, Lord? Of what avail are we, thy fancies? Oh,
why dost thou not sleep? Sleep! Sleep! Sleep!
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
(_Staggering on._) Oh, ho, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho, ho! Space--Time--I have
made me these! Suns--Planets--I have made me these! Love--Hate--I have
made me these! Hope--Fear--I have made me these! Beauty--I have made me
this! Oh, ho, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho, ho! (_He staggers on, gesticulating
and laughing stupendously._)
BEAUTY
(_Wildly._) I will be worshiped! I will be worshiped!